Campaign group Liberty to launch legal appeal that will call for journalists to receive stronger legal protections from state surveillance
The government has agreed that the UK’s mass surveillance laws do not provide adequate protection to confidential journalistic material and sources.
It conceded the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, widely known as the Snoopers’ Charter, fails to provide adequate safeguards to protect confidential journalistic material from surveillance by intelligence services.
The admission was revealed in a High Court decision last week, giving the campaign group Liberty permission to bring an appeal to challenge the lawfulness of the UK’s “bulk surveillance powers”.
Liberty argues that the UK’s bulk surveillance regime allows intelligence agencies to “scoop up private communications and internet data of swaths of the [British] population” without adequate legal safeguards.
The Security Service MI5 and GCHQ can also hack into the public’s computers, phones and tables to create “vast personal datasets” of information on the population, with no cause for suspicion, it says.
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I thought journalists were part of the government. Huh, the more you know.