In a historic ruling, the European Court of Human Rights has declared that mass surveillance by Britain’s GCHQ spy agency was completely illegal, vindicating whistleblower Edward Snowden, and prompting calls for him to be pardoned.
The court noted that there were “fundamental deficiencies” in the GCHQ’s interception of communications, namely that no politician or entity had authorised the data gathering, that search terms GCHQ used to trawl through the data had not been included in a warrant application, and that individual names, email addresses, and phone numbers had not been authorized to be spied on by the UK government.
Snowden has previously blown the whistle on how GCHQ was scouring all online and telephone data in the UK via a program code named ‘Tempora’.
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Summit.news reports: Former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who had to destroy hard drives given to him by Snowden in 2013 before the government seized them, lauded the ruling:
Snowden responded, saying that he couldn’t have done what he did without journalists and human rights lawyers:
The ruling led to new calls for Snowden, still hiding out in Moscow, as well as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, languishing in prison, to be given their lives back:
The GCHQ continues to spy on British citizens, as we reported last November it has been monitoring the movement of British people minute by minute to check if they are complying with government restrictions.
According to reports, the spy agency embedded a ‘cell’ within Number 10 Downing Street in order to provide Prime Minister Boris Johnson with real time information pertaining to the public’s movements.
