UK MPs Hold Emergency Debate After Court Makes It Legal For GCHQ To Spy On Them (westerndailypress.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: After decades of a gentleman's agreement to exempt them from surveillance, UK MPs have discovered that GCHQ now deems them as legitimate targets of surveillance. Consequently, members of the UK Parliament have called for an emergency debate on domestic surveillance. Shadow Commons leader Chris Bryant said: "To all intents and purposes, it means that the Wilson doctrine is dead. It is the cornerstone of the bill of rights and it is one of the most ancient freedoms of this country. In another era, before the existence of telephones and emails it meant that MPs and peers, even in war, had a right for their written correspondence not to be intercepted or be interfered with."

Comments

Re:But wait...

[AmiMoJo]

There was a law, but GCHQ doesn't obey laws. They simply employ people to find legal arguments to bypass them, or if that doesn't work they just ignore them and hope no-one finds out.

MPs must be extremely stupid if they think that they were not being spied on even when their gentleman's agreement was supposedly being enforced. Having to somehow avoid MP's correspondence when doing a full take capture of internet traffic is impossible. I pointed this out to my MP, but she was too dumb to understand it and appeared willing to take GCHQ's word for it that they would never break the law, despite me including copies of their documents detailing how to break the law.

Now she wants to be the next Prime Minister.

Re:Why are they worried?

[bill_mcgonigle]

With scandal after scandal, the same parties stay in power. It's the same everywhere.

That's because the parties are only an illusion of choice, perpetuated to placate the masses. Strike the root.

Re:Please, I implore you, explain how that works.

[silentcoder]

Corporations are international - if they can do it anywhere, they can do it everywhere - and there is plenty of history (recent history) of corporations engaging in paramilitary activity to protect profits. Not so long ago Coca-Cola actually opened fire on striking workers at a plant in South America.
Even more recently London Based LonMin pulled another favourite trick: getting the police to do their dirty work for them, and killed 38 striking miners here in South Africa.

The amazing thing is that in the ongoing investigations which have yet to yield any restitution for the survivors or justice against those who pulled the triggers, the ministers who authorised force or anybody else... nobody has so much as questioned the complicity of the lonmin executives.

The reality is that if they can do it anywhere, the effects are felt everywhere - and the laws intended to prevent that are sadly not well enforced.

The US has had a law making it illegal to import goods made with child-labour since 2001. Yet child-labour remains rampant throughout the developing world - and the factories doing it almost exclusively manufacture goods for US corporations that sell it domestically. If the law was properly enforced, the biggest market would disapear, corporations wouldn't dare buy from any factory if there is even the whiff of a risk of child labour being used - and that would destroy the viability of child labour as a business model - and do a great deal to improve the quality of life of the entire developing world. There is literally no single intervention that can do as much good as to get the children out of the factories and into schools.