Amnesty International suspects British intelligence surveillance, will take legal action against UK
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/09/amnesty-international-suspects-british-intelligence-surveillance-will-take-legal-action-against-uk-government/
Amnesty International suspects British intelligence surveillance, will take legal action against UK government
By Matthew Taylor, The Guardian
Monday, December 9, 2013 1:57 EST
The human rights group Amnesty International has announces that 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.