UK admits it spied illegally for 17 years, is sorry, won't stop

The Verge reports UK admits it spied illegally for 17 years, is sorry, won't stop

The ruling has both good news and bad news for British spies. First, the bad news: the court found that, between 1998 and the tail end of 2015, GCHQ’s bulk collection program was conducted in brazen defiance of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Parliament never approved the program as legal, despite several opportunities to do so.

The good news is that last November — years after the initial Snowden disclosures and months after the Privacy International lawsuit was filed — the GCHQ’s bulk collection program was changed to include more disclosure on the underlying policies, rendering it legal without affecting the underlying operations. As a result, nothing has to change, and it’s unlikely that anyone involved in the program will face repercussions of any kind."