- Mar 17, 2015
- 2,387
Rights group Privacy International today published previously confidential documents which it claims highlight for the first time the sheer scale of bulk collection of sensitive personal data on UK citizens by the authorities.
The cache of documents was made available to the privacy group in preparation for its Investigatory Powers Tribunal case about “whether the acquisition, use, retention, disclosure, storage and deletion of Bulk Personal Datasets [BPDs] is in accordance with the law and necessary and proportionate.”
They reveal that bulk collection of data on innocent citizens goes way beyond internet and phone records.
Specifically, GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 are said to routinely obtain mass datasets from public and private organizations in the UK, giving them access to medical, financial, travel, commercial and many other records.
Privacy International claimed the authorities have been doing this in secret for 15 years, although the documents also describe the use of Section 94 of the pre-internet era Telecommunications Act 1984 to access data in bulk.
The rights group said intelligence agencies have been unable to provide details on exactly how many personal records have been extracted as part of BPD programs and dumped in classified databases.
However, it’s obvious that there are concerns around the safety of such data from hackers, and from abuse by insiders.
In fact, some of the documents detail “policies, procedures and safeguards” designed to prevent abuses. These effectively amount to the intelligence services telling agents not to search for people “of no security interest” in the databases.
Full Article. UK Spies’ Mass Data Collection Laid Bare
The cache of documents was made available to the privacy group in preparation for its Investigatory Powers Tribunal case about “whether the acquisition, use, retention, disclosure, storage and deletion of Bulk Personal Datasets [BPDs] is in accordance with the law and necessary and proportionate.”
They reveal that bulk collection of data on innocent citizens goes way beyond internet and phone records.
Specifically, GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 are said to routinely obtain mass datasets from public and private organizations in the UK, giving them access to medical, financial, travel, commercial and many other records.
Privacy International claimed the authorities have been doing this in secret for 15 years, although the documents also describe the use of Section 94 of the pre-internet era Telecommunications Act 1984 to access data in bulk.
The rights group said intelligence agencies have been unable to provide details on exactly how many personal records have been extracted as part of BPD programs and dumped in classified databases.
However, it’s obvious that there are concerns around the safety of such data from hackers, and from abuse by insiders.
In fact, some of the documents detail “policies, procedures and safeguards” designed to prevent abuses. These effectively amount to the intelligence services telling agents not to search for people “of no security interest” in the databases.
Full Article. UK Spies’ Mass Data Collection Laid Bare
