UK’s data spying after Snowden violated privacy rights

The UK government’s programme ‘had been authorised by the Secretary of State, and not by a body independent of the executive’, that lacked the ‘end-to-end safeguards’, to narrow the scope of the data being intercepted, the European Court of Human Rights said in a decision published Tuesday. — AP

The UK’s bulk interception of its own citizens’ communications in the wake of revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden violated their privacy laws, Europe’s human-rights tribunal ruled.

The UK government’s programme “had been authorised by the Secretary of State, and not by a body independent of the executive”, that lacked the “end-to-end safeguards”, to narrow the scope of the data being intercepted, the European Court of Human Rights said in a decision published Tuesday.