privacyinternational.org
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GCHQ tapping into international fibre optic cables, shares intel with NSA - 22 juin 2013
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 (...)
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Top secret NSA program spying on millions of US citizens - 7 juin 2013
The revelations of the US government’s massive and indiscriminate surveillance program are absolutely frightening, putting before the public’s eyes the breadth of a secret, dragnet spying regime which casts every US citizen as a suspect.
The unearthing of this top secret court order shows that even in a country (...)
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The UK Communications Data Bill is no more - 9 mai 2013
Privacy International welcomes the absence of a Communications Data Bill in the Queen’s Speech. The Communications Data bill was originally set to significantly expand the powers of communications surveillance in the UK and set another bad standard globally. Because of the work by Parliamentarians, a concerted (...)
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The "Snoopers’ Charter" is dead... - 29 avril 2013
The current iteration of the UK’s "Communications Data Bill" is now dead.
Privacy International has been working closely with others behind the scenes to work on understanding what little case there was, and fundamentally demolishing it.
The UK Government is now examining a "middle way" for the legitimate law (...)
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Positive indications for health privacy in England - 29 avril 2013
We very much welcome today’s announcement by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt that people will be allowed to opt out of having their medical records shared in the NHS England centralised information bank.
The move is an important one for data privacy and patient choice, and has been a key objective of Privacy (...)
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Audit and Consent : Health databases in a noSQL world - 22 avril 2013
Privacy International welcomes the news that the UK NHS Data Spine is being replaced. We have fundamental privacy concerns about the existing infrastructure, and the proposed changes have the potential to enable the necessary privacy protections to be implemented in a meaningful way.
Core elements of the NHS (...)
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Peaceful Protester’s personal data removed from extremism database - 27 mars 2013
"This judgment exposes the widespread and sinister nature of police surveillance of ordinary members of the public in this country. It also acts as a safeguard against the creeping criminalisation of peaceful protest. The Association of Police Officers and Metropolitan Police Commissioner have sanctioned this (...)
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Microsoft report helps to connect the dots on access to communications data - 27 mars 2013
The long-awaited release by Microsoft today of data about the number of law enforcement requests received and complied with by the company represents an important step forward in the ongoing challenge of understanding the scale of government access to communications information.
The data, the first set released (...)
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Privacy and policing databases : European Court ruling in M.M v. the United Kingdom - 27 mars 2013
In November 2012 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled in M.M v. the United Kingdom that retention and disclosure of a job applicant’s police records to potential employers was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court ruled that the practice cannot be regarded as being in (...)
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HMRC must investigate potential breach of UK export laws by Gamma International in face of new evidence - 13 mars 2013
A report released today by Citizen Lab has uncovered further evidence that British company Gamma International has sold their surveillance technology FinFisher to repressive regimes abroad, despite having no export licence to do so. The report builds on investigations conducted last year that demonstrated that (...)
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The Manufacture of ’Surveillance by Consent’ - 7 mars 2013
It’s not often that you get to witness the birth of a new philosophy. However, according to the UK Home Office, a new philosophy is at the heart of their new Surveillance Camera Code of Practice, published this month, and currently subject to a badly publicized consultation process. The name of this new philosophy (...)
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Lawful interception : the Russian approach - 5 mars 2013
In order to lawfully conduct communications surveillance ("lawful interception" ) in the U.S. and Western Europe, a law enforcement agency must seek authorisation from a court and produce an order to a network operator or internet service provider, which is then obliged to intercept and then to deliver the (...)
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Big Brother Inc. - 19 février 2013
The global surveillance industry is estimated at $5 billion a year. The capabilities of surveillance technology have grown hugely in the past decade "“ in the hands of a repressive regime, this equipment eradicates free speech, quashes dissent and places dissidents at the mercy of ruling powers as effectively as (...)
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European Parliament committees threaten wholesale destruction of privacy and data protection rights - 13 février 2013
Just over a year ago, vitally important reforms to European privacy and data protection laws were proposed. Now these reforms, which will affect the rights of half a billion Europeans, are being watered down in their passage through various European parliamentary committees as MEPs succumb to an unprecedented (...)
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Amazon and eBay lobbyists found to be writing EU data protection law in copy-paste legislation scandal - 11 février 2013
A European privacy group claimed today that dozens of amendments to the new Data Protection Regulation being proposed by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are being copied word-for-word from corporate lobby papers, with MEPs frequently failing to even remember their own amendments. Max Schrems, of the (...)
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Human rights organisations file formal complaints against surveillance firms Gamma International and Trovicor with British and German governments - 4 février 2013
Privacy International, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Bahrain Watch and Reporters without Borders filed formal complaints with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the UK and Germany against two surveillance companies on (...)
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On International Data Privacy Day - who is reading your emails ? - 28 janvier 2013
On International Data Privacy Day, it is important that we all ask ourselves : who has access to our personal information ? Who can find out where we’ve been and who we’ve called, who can read our emails and our text messages ? Who can find which websites we access and which files we download ?
Statistics released (...)
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Google Transparency Report for second half of 2012 shows European government attempts to access private data at an all-time high - 27 janvier 2013
Google’s latest Transparency Report, released at 3pm GMT this afternoon, shows that requests by European governments for the browsing history, email communications, documents and IP addresses of Google’s users have skyrocketed since the Transparency Report was launched three years ago. Countries in the European (...)
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Bull quietly offloads controversial surveillance technology after Libya revelations - 27 janvier 2013
The social news website MiroirSocial.com confirmed yesterday that the prominent French technology firm Bull SA has sold its controversial mass surveillance "Eagle" system to Stéphane Salies, one of its chief designers and an ex-director of Bull. The surveillance software was previously manufactured and supplied by (...)
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Digitised oppression : Saudi electronic tracking system another step in the wrong direction for women’s rights - 20 décembre 2012
It was only last year that women in Saudi Arabia finally gained the right to vote. However, it seems a sad case of "˜one step forward, two steps back’, as this year it was discovered that all Saudi women are being electronically tracked by their male "˜guardians’, who are automatically sent text messages when their (...)
