Our landmark legal challenge to the Investigatory Powers Act – better known as the Snoopers’ Charter – had its first victory today.
The High Court has ruled that the Government is breaking the law by forcing companies to store records of all our calls, messages, emails and our entire internet history, and then letting dozens of bodies access this private information – all with no independent oversight and no need for suspicion of crime.
Ministers now have until November to change the law.
But it doesn’t need tweaking – it needs tearing up. And we must keep fighting.
The Government is on the run after court verdicts that have made it clear their current approach is incompatible with our rights.
We now need your help to challenge the rest of the Snoopers’ Charter and defeat it for good. Without extra funds, we can’t go to court.
We’re about to launch the next round of our legal challenge, which will take on powers to intercept our communications in bulk, hack into our computers, phones and tablets and to create vast ‘personal datasets’.
These powers undermine the values that we hold dearest and that keep us free. Our privacy and protest rights. Our free speech and our free press. Patient confidentiality, legal privilege and protections for journalists’ sources and whistle-blowers.
The Government knows it has to rethink parts of the Investigatory Powers Act. But we need to make them go back to the drawing board and create a surveillance regime with the protection of our rights at its heart. We need effective, targeted surveillance – not powers to spy on all of us, all the time.
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