14 DAY TRIAL // Edward Snowden has had been really busy this past weekend. Aside from popping up for the New Yorker Festival, the NSA whistleblower also showed up virtually in London where he took on the topic of the GCHQ.
Snowden has warned that the United Kingdom spy agencies are using technology to conduct mass surveillance on the population. Since there aren’t any checks and overview, the UK’s activities are even worse than the NSA’s violation of people’s right to privacy.
The whistleblower was speaking at the Observer Festival of Ideas that was held in London, where he made an appearance via videolink, like he’s accustomed us all by now.
No constitutional protection means more surveillance
Asked whether the GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, has a bigger role in the mass surveillance of the world than the NSA documents leaked so far suggest, Snowden admitted that this is indeed the case. He justified his answer by pointing out that there are no constitutional protections in the UK, which makes spying on everyone via digital channels that much easier.
“We have an extraordinary large, secret and unaccountable mass surveillance system in the United States – and that’s when we have constitutional protections that prohibit even the passage of any laws that might enable those programs. Despite this we have something extraordinary going on over there. Now in the United Kingdom where you don’t have the same constitutional limits on the sort of laws that parliament can pass what we’ve seen is the creation of a system of regulations where basically anything goes,” Snowden said.
He goes on, saying that the GCHQ and other spy agencies in the UK can do virtually anything they want since there are no limits on their capabilities. Instead, they just collect everything that might be interesting to them, “which includes basically a five year backlog of all the activities of citizens in the UK, for example by the collection of their metadata records, which is who they call, the locations that they travel where their cell phones are associated with towers.”
Snowden dismissed claims made by these spy agencies that they protect the collected information with the help of policies and rules, indicating that while it’s true that they’ll only look at data following those procedures, it doesn’t change the fact that the information was gathered in the first place.
Policy restrictions mean nothing
The whistleblower states that even though there are policy restrictions, the rules and policies for accessing the data are not uniformly applied.
“There are exceptions, and it’s basically open season at these spy agencies. For example, the GCHQ goes far further than the NSA in the United States does because they use unlawfully collected information to pursue basically criminal prosecutions. And they use this to share with other countries, where they will use intelligence powers – foreign intelligence powers – to gather information that’s then used for law enforcement purposes. And this is very dangerous,” Snowden states.
This means that people don’t have the ability to challenge in court the data that was collected on them in this manner. He states that if judges aren’t aware of where the evidence comes from, it undermines the system of laws.
Snowden once more says that it’s not reasonable for the government to trample over people’s privacy rights just because they can. Furthermore, citizens don’t have to justify why they need their privacy, but rather the government has to justify why it has violated their rights.
You can see Snowden after the 4:40:00 mark in the video below.
