Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Illegally Spied On Amnesty International
Mark Wilson writes with this excerpt from a story at Beta News: A court has revealed that the UK intelligence agency, GCHQ, illegally spied on human rights organization Amnesty International. It is an allegation that the agency had previously denied, but an email from the Investigatory Powers Tribunal backtracked on a judgement made in June which said no such spying had taken place.
The email was sent to Amnesty International yesterday, and while it conceded that the organization was indeed the subject of surveillance, no explanation has been offered. It is now clear that, for some reason, communications by Amnesty International were illegally intercepted, stored, and examined. What is not clear is when the spying happened, what data was collected and, more importantly, why it happened.
The email was sent to Amnesty International yesterday, and while it conceded that the organization was indeed the subject of surveillance, no explanation has been offered. It is now clear that, for some reason, communications by Amnesty International were illegally intercepted, stored, and examined. What is not clear is when the spying happened, what data was collected and, more importantly, why it happened.
Though I agree with you in spirit, I don't know why almost all the posts decrying the spying nowadays imply that there was a better time in the past, like we have lost some benevolent government we used to have. Check out what J Edgar Hoover was doing with the FBI through most of the 20th century. At least we don't have FBI directors for life now. And in the 60's we had the sitting president's brother as the federal attorney general, put there under instructions of the president's father (who bought an election or two to get his son in power). And that president (JFK) has been beloved since his death. I can't see a credible claim that things are any worse now than they were in the "good old days".