New campaign launched: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/snooperscharterpart2/

Dear Supporter,

Stop the Snoopers’ Charter

Last year you kindly donated to our legal challenge to the Investigatory Powers Act – better known as the Snoopers’ Charter. Today I have some amazing news to share with you, our landmark legal challenge had its first victory today. Thank you so much for your support.

The High Court has ruled that the Government is breaking the law by forcing companies to store records of all our calls, messages, emails and our entire internet history, and then letting dozens of bodies access this private information – all without independent oversight and no need for suspicion of crime.

Ministers now have until November to change the law. Your support made this success possible.

But it doesn’t need tweaking – it needs tearing up. And we must keep fighting.

The Government is on the run after court verdicts that have made it clear their current approach is incompatible with our rights.

We now need your help to challenge the rest of the Snoopers’ Charter and defeat it for good. Without extra funds, we can’t go to court.

We’re about to launch the next round of our legal challenge, which will take on powers to intercept our communications in bulk, hack into our computers, phones and tablets and to create vast ‘personal datasets’.

These powers undermine the values that we hold dearest and that keep us free. Our privacy and protest rights. Our free speech and our free press. Patient confidentiality, legal privilege and protections for journalists’ sources and whistle-blowers.

We’re contacting everyone who donated last time around to ask if you would be happy to support our legal action to defeat the Snoopers’ Charter for good.

The Government knows it has to rethink parts of the Investigatory Powers Act. But we need to make them go back to the drawing board and create a surveillance regime with the protection of our rights at its heart. We need effective, targeted surveillance – not powers to spy on all of us, all the time.

Thank you for your support – it’s taken us one step closer to reclaiming our rights.

Corey

Corey Stoughton
Advocacy Director, Liberty

Liberty has been granted permission to challenge the Government’s Snoopers’ Charter.

In January, we raised more than £50,000 to fund the challenge and we couldn’t have taken the case forward without you.

Unlawful and unsafe

The Snoopers’ Charter, officially known as the Investigatory Powers Act, is a hugely invasive piece of legislation. It forces companies such as Vodafone, Sky and BT to collect and hand over vast amounts of personal information. This includes logs of emails, phone calls, texts and entire web browsing history.

This is a breach of British people’s human rights – and one that will not keep us any safer.

More than 200,000 people signed a petition calling for the repeal of the Investigatory Powers Act after it became law last year.

It passed through Parliament in the face of shambolic political opposition. The Government failed to provide evidence that surveillance of everybody in the UK was lawful or necessary. This was despite warnings from whistleblowers and experts that the powers would make it more difficult for security services to do their jobs effectively.

Targeted not total surveillance

It’s become clearer in recent months that the Snoopers’ Charter is not fit for purpose. The Government doesn’t need to spy on the entire population to fight terrorism. All that does is undermine the very rights, freedoms and democracy terrorists seek to destroy.

As increasingly frequent hacking attacks bring businesses and public bodies to their knees, our Government’s obsession with storing vast amounts of sensitive information about every single one of us is dangerously irresponsible.

If they truly want to keep us safe and protect our cybersecurity, they urgently need to face up to reality and focus on closely monitoring people who pose a serious threat.

Thank you once again for your support. We will keep you updated on the next steps of the challenge.

Liberty has officially begun proceedings to challenge the Government’s mass surveillance programme – the Investigatory Powers Act.

The Act allows the Government to keep a track of who you call or text, which websites you visit, your sexual preferences, health worries, religious and political beliefs – and share these intimate details with dozens of agencies. We believe this is a serious infringement on our human rights, and taking the Government to court is the first step in reclaiming these rights.

We’ve now applied to the High Court for permission to proceed. If permission is granted, we’ll be needing your support once again to continue the fight against this authoritarian regime.

Without you, we couldn’t have reached this point – thank you. We'll keep you updated as the case progresses.

Thanks to you and 1,843 other people, we have (so far) raised £52,828 for our court case against the Investigatory Powers Act.

I have been completely overwhelmed, not only because of the amazing sum being raised for our case, but also because of how many people care so much about something that can sometimes feel quite intangible. The Government doesn't want you to care –  it would make their lives much easier if you didn’t.

In today’s world, pretty much everyone lives their lives online in some shape or form. I know I certainly do.

And it’s disturbing to know the fact that you’re reading this right now is being recorded. The details of the next text you send will be logged: who it goes to, where you are and when you send it. Whether you spend the next three hours on Netflix, have an unhealthy addiction to buying trainers or spend eight hours a day playing 'Clash of Clans'.

Your sexual preferences, health worries, religious and political beliefs. All of it monitored by the Government.

But, thanks to you and those 1,843-brilliant people we smashed our first target, and we now have a great chance to fight this authoritarian surveillance regime.

This case will entail a huge amount of work so we have instructed specialist solicitors from Bhatt Murphy who, like our barristers, have kindly agreed to act for us on a conditional fee agreement. This means that the money we raise won’t be used to pay their legal fees, but it will protect us if the Court orders us to pay the Government’s costs.

Please continue to share are our CrowdJustice page with your friends and family, colleagues and confidantes. Whether you send it via email, Facebook or Twitter we would really appreciate your support. And we will be sure to keep you up-to-date as the case progresses.

Together we can do this.

Thanks to your wonderful generosity we have hit our initial target! 

This means we can request permission from the Court to proceed with our case against the Government. It helps us with our costs exposure, should the other side win.

If we are successful in getting through to the next stage of the case, our costs will go up considerably, so please continue to donate and share our page!

If we don’t receive permission to proceed with the case (we are confident we will), we’ll use the funds raised for our campaigning on surveillance and digital rights - digital campaigning, raising awareness through the media, providing training on digital security, and policy work to get Parliament to stand up for our rights.

We are overwhelmed and delighted by the generosity of our pledgers, THANK YOU!

We’ve hit our first target but there is so much more to do, please continue to donate and share and together we will challenge the most authoritarian surveillance law the world has ever known.