Ride the Lightning

UK Holds Massive Amount of Ordinary Citizens’ Data

April 26, 2016

The UK's three major spy agencies have been covertly collecting personal data about British citizens on a massive scale since the 1990s and haven't always followed their own protocols about its use, according to a story from CNet which cites documents published on April 20th.

Privacy International, a rights group that has scrutinized the agencies since 2013, when whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed governments' widespread spying on average citizens, published almost 80 previously secret files from GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.

The files, released to the group in response to a legal complaint filed last year, provide new insights into an activity known as "bulk personal dataset" collection. The information comprises detailed medical, travel and financial records, communications data and the contents of e-mails and phone calls, even for people the agencies acknowledged in the documents are "unlikely to be of intelligence or security interest."

Few people realized that the agencies seek out, store and search data as personal as National Health Service records and signatures of online petitions. The documents also show that the data has been collected regardless of whether a citizen may pose a threat to national security.

None of the agencies provided details to Privacy International about the number of British citizens in the database. But internal memos contained in the documents reveal they include the families and friends of spy agency employees, as well as the staff members themselves.

Information about the existence of the data collection became public in a March 2015 report from the Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, which oversees the spy agencies. Committee members indicated in the report their concern over the absence of legal penalties for misuse of bulk personal datasets. The committee also noted that the data's collection had not been publicly acknowledged and that Parliament had not weighed in on privacy and safeguards. There was also concern that access to datasets didn't require approval from senior government ministers but was instead controlled internally. Doesn't that sound like a recipe for disaster?

MI5, MI6 and GCHQ did not respond to a request for comment. I am not precisely shocked at their silence.

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