A British court has ruled that the UK spy agency that trolls the Internet and shares the harvest by the American NSA (National Security Agency) was doing so unlawfully for seven years. Oddly, now that the agency's "rules" for gathering every piece of data sent by anyone, anywhere have been made public, the project is now legal, according to published reports in Britain.
The GCHQ (General Central Headquarters) began sweeping up the data in 2007, according to a ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, picking up much of it from the NSA.
The ruling was made public earlier this month, and published accounts appeared in various newspapers in the UK and in Ireland.
The ruling was supported largely by documents leaked by Edward Snowden, according to the reports. The tribunal filed its judgment in December, and it was made public 6 February. Want to read it yourself? Here's a link, provided by The Guardian newspaper: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/06/liberty-vs-gchq-read-the-order-and-judgment-of-the-tribunal-pdf.
So while the seven year stretch of scooping up all the records of phone calls, Internet searches, emails, and all the other things in the category of "metadata" was clearly unlawful, the UK government claims that now that the "rules" have been made public and the people know about the super dooper snooper scooper program, it's now okay, and the spy agencies can continue.
Say what?
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