Thread by @jimkillock

It has been a long road since 2013 when @OpenRightsGroup @BigBrotherWatch @englishpen and Constanze Kurz took the UK to the ECHR over the @Snowden revelations:

privacynotprism.org.uk

Donations from across Europe paid for us to go the ECHR.

Today the ECHR came in with its final judgment that the UK’s laws were deficient and lacked crucial safeguards.

openrightsgroup.org/press-releases…

The court’s judgment makes it plain that bulk interception is a dangerous technology that requires special supervision.

At para 361 the judgment sets out the criteria for assessing bulk surveillance:

hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-2100… btw

In several of these areas, the judgment goes on to assess the UK’s 2013 RIPA regime as too weak. (paras 425-7)

However, even in this assessment, there are dissenters, who wanted the court to go further. They have drawn a few criticisms of the judgment, for not recognising the blanket, bulk interception as a rather serious privacy infringement.

Something that may turn out to be a weakness in the judgment is the way that the criteria are applied, they say. The dissenting judges wanted harder criteria to be applied, and for those to stand alone, rather than risk being applied as a “global” assessment.

To be fair to the court, it has also recognised the need for case law to evolve. So it may be that these points are revisited and the criteria evolve in meaning and strictness.

Of course the risk is that the secretive nature of the powers means that this never happens.

The court’s assessment of the 2013 safeguards in RIPA is also rather weak. For instance, it accepts that the IPT offered a remedy for people surveilled incorrectly, and that the Interception Commission was capable of oversight of the regime as a whole.

That is worrying because it will encourage future Governments, both the UK and others, to believe that procedures, if present, should be enough to persuade the ECHR that safeguards are functional.

It places a great burden on civil society to find cases to show otherwise.

In general, the deference given to Governments over surveillance powers given the “threats” they are facing may prove to be in the wrong place.

More powers used more often require closer supervision and more attention from the courts.