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18 Sep 2018

UK: Govt. unlawfully obtained data from communications co's, European Court of Human Rights rules

On Thursday 13 September 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that some UK surveillance programs, including the bulk interception of communications, violated the human right to privacy. The complaint before the ECtHR was brought by a coalition of civil and human rights campaigners and focused on: 1) The bulk interception of communications; 2) Intelligence sharing with foreign governments; and 3) The obtaining of communications data from communications service providers. While the judges did not find bulk collection itself to be in violation of the convention, they did find that the government put insufficient safeguards around how it did it and - by six votes to one - found that the government unlawfully obtained data from communications companies. On 25 May 2021, the ECtHR issued its final ruling in this case, setting out important guarantees against mass surveillance online. It recognised the difference between surveillance of individual communications and bulk interception of communications with the use of metadata, and introduced a set of procedural guarantees to be respected at initial, intermediary and final stages of bulk data surveillance.