If you’ve lived on Planet Earth during the last 50 years, the omnivorous, unconscionable, and unconstitutional spooks at the NSA have not only spied on you, they’ve collected your data and squirreled it away for future use. Enter Privacy International, which won a “recent legal victory” over the GCHQ (“Government Communications Headquarters”), Britain’s version of the NSA. “The implications of … [that] victory … means [sic] that intelligence sharing from the NSA to GCHQ prior to December 2014 was unlawful. Anyone in the world”–yep, that includes you, long-suffering serf of the USSA—“can try to find out if their records were collected by the NSA and were unlawfully shared with GCHQ.” Even better, you can then demand that “any information unlawfully obtained is deleted.” Warning: I’m not sure, nor have I found anyone who seems to be, that either the GCHQ or NSA must comply with your request. But at least you’ll know that these snoops violated you, and that fact may come in handy at some point. Larry Klayman, for example, also filed suit against the NSA’s surveillance and won; an appeals court overturned the decision on the Alice-in-Wonderland grounds that since the NSA refuses to divulge its targets, neither he nor the other plaintiffs could prove the agency spied on them personally; Mr. Klayman has now found such a plaintiff and is bringing suit again before a sympathetic judge.
Our heroes at Privacy International go even further than winning in the courts: they’ve also “designed [a] website to assist you in creating the paperwork you need to file with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT).” The drawback: you must supply personal information, such as your name, telephone number[s], address[es], etc, to the GCHQ. But the bureaucrats “are only allowed to keep your details for the purposes of establishing whether or not they spied on you unlawfully and for the duration of the investigation by the IPT.”
Short of outright revolution against the Security State, wresting our freedom from these criminals will be a long, slow fight. Here’s one small skirmish in that battle. Lock and load, friends.
1:14 pm on September 16, 2015
