Of course Britain does economic spying
Journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted:
Remember, as they’ve said over and over - the Five Eyes Alliance doesn’t do economic spying https://twitter.com/micahflee/stat …
Of course they do economic spying.
Britain’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), the law which makes mass surveillance legal, explicitly allows the use of surveillance “for the purpose of safeguarding the economic well-being of the United Kingdom”.
The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIP) included provisions to prevent data gathering for purely economic purposes. The UK was forced to pass DRIP after the European Court repealed UK spy agencies’ access to records acquired via mass surveillance.
Greenwald’s link shows New Zealand using spying software XKEYSCORE to scan all e-mail for information on candidates for Director-General of the World Trade Organization. Under DRIP, it would now be illegal for the UK to make this scan unless it was also necessary for national security or the prevention of crime, but DRIP does not apply to other countries like the US or NZ with whom the UK could trade for information.
The special value of a mass surveillance system is that if you can read everyone’s e-mail, you can scan it all for information of interest like this, rather than targeting only known accounts.
The spy agencies claim that this respects privacy because staff don’t leaf through everyone’s e-mail, but only search for keywords and then leaf through those results. Technically you have privacy, unless you communicate certain words or phrases or to certain people, and the prohibited phrases and people are a state secret, as is the fact that our governments routinely copy and search everyone’s e-mail.
This amounts to a “general warrant”, something outlawed long ago in the US by the Fourth Amendment, specifically to protect citizens from unreasonable search of their private papers and property by British agents. More than 200 years later, British agents are once again free to read American citizens’ private communications.
Even earlier, English law established in 1765 that Britain (and hence also the US, who inherited the English legal system) has no right to search or seize documents without specific probable cause:
Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden ruled that both the search and the seizure was unlawful, as the warrant authorized the seizure of all of Entick’s papers—not just the criminal ones—and as the warrant lacked probable cause to even justify the search.
The Fourth Amendment was written because Colonial American law was biased toward British tax revenue and economic interests rather than the freedom and privacy of American citizens, something which sparked the Boston Tea Party and contributed to the demand for American independence.
Yet here in 2015 our governments are violating these centuries-established basic rights for the same economic reasons, and hardly anyone takes notice.