Following the many Snowden leaks that revealed some of the advanced mass data collection practices employed by spy agencies including the NSA and GCHQ, a collection of privacy advocates including Privacy International, Bytes for All, Liberty and Amnesty International has just won a major case against these practices.
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The Next Web reports that a U.K. court found that GCHQ had obtained millions of private communications from the NSA illegally. Thanks to this decision, anyone interested in finding out whether his or her personal data has been caught in any of the agency’s data collection operations can now do so.
To learn whether the NSA and GCHQ have spied on you, you can go to a special web page set up by Privacy International and fill in your details, including phone number and email address.
The privacy rights group will then collect the data and submit a request to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (the same body that ruled in its favor before), requesting that any records containing your personal data be deleted.
“The public have a right to know if they were illegally spied on, and GCHQ must come clean on whose records they hold that they should never have had in the first place,” deputy director of Privacy International Eric King said. “There are few chances that people have to directly challenge the seemingly unrestrained surveillance state, but individuals now have a historic opportunity finally hold GCHQ accountable for their unlawful actions.”
Anyone in the world can use Privacy International’s tool — available at this link.
