UK spy agencies illegally collected data for years, court rules

The U.K.’s spy agencies breached the European Convention on Human Rights for years by secretly collecting almost everything about British citizens’ communications except their content, a U.K. court has ruled.

However, now that the U.K. government has admitted what it is doing, the collection is legal, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled Monday.

It has yet to rule on the issue of proportionality, or whether the agencies’ actions were reasonable given the threat they sought to counter.

Responding to a June 2015 complaint by campaign group Privacy International, the tribunal said the secret intelligence agencies had breached the ECHR for years because of the way they gathered bulk communications data (BCD) and bulk personal data (BPD).

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