Did GCHQ spy on you? Find out now!

Since its launch on 16 February 2015, over 25 000 people have joined an international campaign to try to learn whether Britain’s intelligence agency, GCHQ, illegally spied on them.

This opportunity is possible thanks to court victory in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), a secret court set up to hear complaints against the British Security Services. As previously reported in the EDRi-gram, Privacy International won the first-ever case against GCHQ in the Tribunal, which ruled that the agency acted unlawfully in accessing millions of private communications collected by the US National Security Agency (NSA), up until December 2014.

Because of this victory, now anyone in the world can try to ask if their records, as collected by the NSA, were part of those communications unlawfully shared with GCHQ. We feel the public has a right to know if they were spied on illegally, and Privacy International wants to help make that as easy as possible.

Unfortunately, the IPT can’t act by itself, and that’s why it needs people to come forward and file complaints. Privacy International plans to assist as many people as possible in jumping through the hoops the process will probably entail. It is going to be a long fight, and it will likely take months for the IPT to process all the complaints. However, it is important to bear in mind that if the IPT find that your communications were illegally shared with GCHQ, they will be obligated to tell you.

Through their secret intelligence-sharing relationship with the NSA, GCHQ has intermittently enjoyed unrestricted access to PRISM, the NSA’s means of directly accessing data and content handled by some of the world’s largest Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Skype, and Apple. GCHQ has also had access to other parts of the NSA’s Upstream collections, through which telephone and internet traffic data is accessed as it flows through communications infrastructure, including CO-TRAVELER, which collects five billion mobile phone locational records a day, and DISHFIRE, which harvests 194 million text messages daily. The top five programs within Upstream created 160 billion interception records in one month alone.

Chances are, at some point over the past decade, your communications were swept up by one of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs and passed onto GCHQ. We think you have a right to know whether that’s the case, and if so, to try and demand that data be deleted. Privacy International wants to help you assert those rights.

Privacy International’s campaign “Did GCHQ illegally spy on you?”
https://privacyinternational.org/illegalspying

FAQ: Did GCHQ Spy On You?
https://privacyinternational.org/?q=node/495

(Contribution by Eric King, Privacy International)