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Content type: News & Analysis
The central premise of international intelligence cooperation is that states are able to both access valuable partner information to protect their national security, and focus their own resources elsewhere in a mutually beneficial way. But is it really a quid-pro-quo partnership?
As the Intercept recently revealed, German policy-makers certainly have reason to doubt that this would be the case. What Germany has learned, like many others before them, is that dependence on the…
Content type: News & Analysis
Investigations by Privacy International in co-operation with VICE Motherboard, reveal that Hacking Team has sold its Remote Control System to the US Drug Enforcement Agency and US military via a front company based in the US.
The investigation catalogues what is known about Hacking Team’s intrusive spyware that can remotely switch on the microphone on mobile phones, activate webcams, as well as modify and/or extract data from the computer or phone itself. Whether the export was corrected…
Content type: News & Analysis
FREAK, the latest security vulnerability to be exposed that has implications for millions of supposedly secure websites, is just the most recent example of something privacy and security advocates have been saying for some time: when governments meddle with our security technologies, it hurts us all.
When the State advocates for backdoors into our communications, they cannot secure them properly and malicious actors can get in. When our elected officials pontificate about spying on us to…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International, Bytes for All and other human rights groups are celebrating a major victory against the Five Eyes today as the UK surveillance tribunal rules that GCHQ acted unlawfully in accessing millions of private communications collected by the NSA up until December 2014.
Today’s judgement represents a monumental leap forward in efforts to make intelligence agencies such as GCHQ and NSA accountable to the millions of individuals whose privacy they have violated.
The…
Content type: Press release
British intelligence services acted unlawfully in accessing millions of people’s personal communications collected by the NSA, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled today. The decision marks the first time that the Tribunal, the only UK court empowered to oversee GHCQ, MI5 and MI6, has ever ruled against the intelligence and security services in its 15 year history.
The Tribunal declared that intelligence sharing between the United States and the…
Content type: Long Read
Modern day government surveillance is based on the simple concept of “more is more” and “bigger is better”. More emails, more text messages, more phone calls, more screenshots from Skype calls. The bigger the haystack, the more needles we can find.
Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that this fundamental idea drives intelligence agencies like the NSA and GCHQ - the desire to collect it all, to generate gigantic haystacks through which to trawl. In the almost two years since the first of Snowden…
Content type: News & Analysis
Intelligence sharing agreements can be open and transparent. In fact, the Five Eyes have already disclosed information sharing agreements that relate to key international law enforcement and national security measures.
They’re called mutual legal assistance treaties, or MLATs, and they’ve existed between the Five Eyes, excluding New Zealand, for decades. MLATs define the scope of cooperation between States in criminal investigations: States share sensitive information in criminal…
Content type: Long Read
Many people imagine intelligence sharing to be a practice whereby men in trench coats silently slide manilla envelopes containing anonymous tip-offs or intelligence reports marked TOP SECRET across tables in smoke-filled rooms.
While such practices certainly exist, they represent only a tiny slice of intelligence sharing activities, and are vastly overshadowed by the massive exchange of bulk unanlysed (raw) intelligence data that takes place between the UK and its Five Eyes allies.…
Content type: Press release
Britain's intelligence services do not need a warrant to receive unlimited bulk intelligence from the NSA and other foreign agencies, and can keep this data on a massive searchable database for up to two years, according to secret internal policies revealed today by human rights organisations.
Details of previously unknown internal policies, which GCHQ was forced to reveal during legal proceedings challenging their surveillance practices in the wake of the Snowden revelations, reveal…
Content type: News & Analysis
From Monday 14 to Friday 18 July, the British intelligence agencies and the Ministers responsible for them will be under the spotlight in an historic case to determine whether GCHQ's mass communications surveillance activities are a violation of Britain's human rights obligations.
Privacy International, along with Amnesty International, Liberty, the American Civil Liberties Union, Pakistani organisation Bytes for All and others, have brought the case before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (…
Content type: News & Analysis
The following is an excerpt from an Op-Ed written in the New Zealand Herald by Privacy International's Legal Officer Anna Crowe:
Since the release of documents by Edward Snowden nearly a year ago, New Zealand has often been seen as a passive participant in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, not unlike a good kid hanging out with the wrong crowd.
However, Snowden documents released last month and the news that New Zealand appears to be sharing intelligence…
Content type: News & Analysis
3 June 2014
The following article written by Carly Nyst, Privacy International's Legal Director, originially appeared on the Future Tense blog on Slate:
The news that the CIA is no longer using vaccination programs as a front for spying operations may come as a relief to many humanitarian workers. Yet their fears should not be completely assuaged, because the CIA’s activities—which undoubtedly threatened the safety of humanitarian workers and those they seek to help—pale in…
Content type: News & Analysis
May Day serves as a timely reminder that across their history, intelligence services have targeted trade unions and other organisations working for progressive social change.
Intelligence agencies have sought to justify expanded surveillance capabilities on the basis of pressing national security threats, particularly terrorism; however, as the Snowden revelations have highlighted, intelligence agencies actually often use these capabilities to monitor organisations that promote human…
Content type: News & Analysis
The latest Snowden document revelation, which shows how GCHQ and the NSA are conducting broad, real-time monitoring of YouTube, Facebook, and Blogger using a program called "Squeaky Dolphin," is the most recent demonstration of the immense interception capabilities of intelligence services.
Despite the program's cute name, "Squeaky Dolphin" is shocking in its ability to intercept raw data, which includes sensitive personal and location information, and keep tabs on people across the world who…
Content type: News & Analysis
The reforms announced today, while positive in some respects, are completely inadequate to address the heart of the problem. Privacy International welcomes steps to minimise the data collected and retained on non-Americans, and the call to increase transparency around requests made to communications service providers. However, in the face of mass surveillance, unaccountable intelligence sharing, arbitrary expansions of the definition of ’national security’, and debased encryption standards…
Content type: News & Analysis
Last week, we learned that the National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of mobile phones where ever they are in the world. The report from of the Washington Post, shows the extraordinary scale and reach of the NSA programs that attempt to know everything about us including our location, at any time.
Unfortunately, a scaled down version of this system is also being sold by private surveillance contractors to the highest bidder. The…
Content type: News & Analysis
A strong, unified voice from the tech industry is absolutely essential to reforming the mass and intrusive surveillance programs being run by the Five Eyes, so we welcome today's statement from AOL, Apple, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo.
Companies have obligations to respect human rights and not be complicit in mass surveillance. Given what has been publicly revealed over the past six months, we must know for certain that the companies we entrust with our information…
Content type: Long Read
The recent revelations, made possible by NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden, of the reach and scope of global surveillance practices have prompted a fundamental re- examination of the role of intelligence services in conducting coordinated cross-border surveillance.
The Five Eyes alliance of States – comprised of the United States National Security Agency (NSA), the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the…
Content type: Press release
Privacy International today has filed a complaint with the Australian Inspector-General of Intelligence Security, calling for an immediate investigation into deeply troubling reports that the Australian intelligence services offered to violate the privacy rights of millions of citizens by handing over bulk metadata to its Five Eye partners.
According to the leaked Five Eyes memo published in the Guardian on 2 December, the Australian Signals Directorate, during a meeting…
Content type: News & Analysis
We, and other privacy advocates, havecriticised the poor provisions of the so-called Safe Harbour agreement, which allows free transfers of personal information from European countries to companies in the United States that have signed up and promise to abide by its Principles. Now the European Commission, prompted by the recent mass surveillance scandals, has published an investigation into this agreement which provides overwhelming evidence that it is not fit for purpose. It…
Content type: Report
The recent revelations, made possible by NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden, of the reach and scope of global surveillance practices have prompted a fundamental re-examination of the role of intelligence services in conducting coordinated cross-border surveillance.
The Five Eyes alliance of States – comprised of the United States National Security Agency (NSA), the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the…
Content type: News & Analysis
With the launch of the "Eyes Wide Open" project, Privacy International has put together a fact sheet about the secretive Five Eyes alliance. Consider this a guide to the secret surveillance alliance that has infiltrated every aspect of the modern global communications system.
Beginning in 1946, an alliance of five English-speaking countries (the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) developed a series of bilateral agreements over more than a decade that became known as the UKUSA…
Content type: Press release
The United Nations General Assembly should approve a new resolution and make clear that indiscriminate surveillance is never consistent with the right to privacy, five human rights organizations said in a November 21, 2013 letter to members of the United Nations General Assembly.
After heated negotiations, the draft resolution on digital privacy initiated by Brazil and Germany emerged on November 21 relatively undamaged, despite efforts by the …
Content type: News & Analysis
It was a throwaway line in a Washington Post article, one of the many stories about government surveillance in the past few months.
By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. [Joint Special Operations Command] troops called this “The Find,” and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit."
Being able to track a mobile phone,…
Content type: Press release
Privacy International today has filed formal complaints with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the UK against some of the world’s leading telecommunication companies, for providing assistance to British spy agency GCHQ in the mass interception of internet and telephone traffic passing through undersea fibre optic cables.
According to recent reports, BT, Verizon Enterprise, Vodafone Cable, Viatel, Level 3, and Interoute granted access to their fibre optic…
Content type: Press release
General Assembly Should Pass Strong Resolution on the Right to Privacy in the Digital Age
(New York, November 21, 2013) – The United Nations General Assembly should approve a new resolution and make clear that indiscriminate surveillance is never consistent with the right to privacy, five human rights organizations said in a November 21, 2013 letter to members of the United Nations General Assembly.
After heated negotiations, the draft resolution on digital…
Content type: News & Analysis
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-international-bank-transactions-a-922430.html*Update: The European Parliament has voted to recommend suspension of its Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) agreement with the US. The vote in favour of suspension only highlights how the NSA’s reported activities have undermined the agreement. Negotiations should immediately commence to strengthen the privacy and redress provisions, to ensure that governments…
Content type: Press release
Civil society organisations today called upon the members of the Human Rights Council to assess whether national surveillance laws and activities are in line with their international human rights obligations.
The Snowden revelations have confirmed that governments worldwide continue to expand their spying capabilities, at home and abroad. Widespread surveillance is being conducted in violation of individuals’ rights to privacy and free expression, and is seldom regulated by strong legal…
Content type: Press release
Transparency reports have traditionally played a critical role in informing the public on the lawful access requests made by governments to companies like Facebook. These reports have provided a useful accountability mechanism for users to know what governments are asking for and how often. Transparency reports also inform users as to what intermediaries are doing to protect their privacy when it comes to sharing data with governments. Given Facebook's ever-growing presence in the lives of…
Content type: Long Read
Britain's spy agency, GCHQ, is secretly conducting mass surveillance by tapping fibre optic cables, giving it access to huge amounts of data on both innocent citizens and targeted suspects, according to a report in the Guardian.
Mass, indiscriminate surveillance of this kind goes against an individual's fundamental human right to privacy. The scope and scale of this program, which monitors the entire British public and much of the world, is neither necessary nor proportionate and thus,…