Posted on Jan 12, 2021 by Caleb Chen
The United Kingdom (UK) High Court has ruled that the country’s security and intelligence agencies can no longer use “general warrants” as legal writ for property interference, aka hacking. The move has been declared a victory for the rule of law by privacy and civil liberties experts around the world. For years, law enforcement in the UK has been using general warrants under an interpretation of the law provided by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) to authorize acts of property interference on multiple targets – as many as hundreds of thousands – at a time. Specifically, the IPT previously claimed that Section 5 of the Intelligence Services Act (ISA) of 1994 permitted the use of general warrants for what is essentially mass hacking.