Amnesty to Take Legal Action Against UK Security Services
Source: The Guardian
Amnesty to take legal action against UK security services
Human rights group says it is 'highly likely' its emails and phone calls have been intercepted by British intelligence
Matthew Taylor and Nick Hopkins
The Guardian, Sunday 8 December 2013
The human rights group Amnesty International has announced it is taking legal action against the UK government over concerns its communications have been illegally accessed by UK intelligence services.
In the latest of a series of legal challenges sparked by the revelations based on documents released by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, Amnesty said it was "highly likely" its emails and phone calls have been intercepted.
Michael Bochenek, director of law and policy for the human rights group, said: "As a global organisation working on many sensitive issues that would be of particular interest to security services in the US and UK, we are deeply troubled by the prospect that the communications of our staff may have been intercepted."
The latest challenge follows revelations that GCHQ and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency (NSA), have developed capabilities to undertake industrial-scale surveillance of the web and mobile phone networks by trawling the servers of internet companies and collecting raw data from the undersea cables that carry web traffic. Two of the programmes, Prism and Tempora, can sweep up vast amounts of private data, which is shared between the two countries.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/amnesty-international-legal-action-uk-security-services
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