UK spy agency guilty of unlawful data retention theregister.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theregister.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
MI5 workers improperly held people's intercepted data for nearly five years, an independent tribunal concluded on Monday, criticising the spy agency for its serious failings.
The Home Office has unlawfully allowed MI5 to gather vast amounts of the public’s data by wrongly approving bulk surveillance warrants, Britain’s most secret court heard today. The Human Right’s groups Liberty and Privacy International told the Investigatory Powers Tribunal that MI5 has provided false information to obtain warrants for bulk surveillance. The Home Office failed to investigate breaches by MI5, some of which date as far back as 2010, and as a result successive Home Secretaries continued to issue unlawful surveillance warrants, the court heard. Liberty lawyer Megan Goulding said that the case showed that the UKs surveillance laws are not fit for purpose and fail to offer adequate safeguards to protect the public from abuse.
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.