Throughout our history many dubious actions have been "legal" but not necessarily right or just.
Stateside, hopefully the Supreme Court will side with privacy rights once those cases wind their way through the courts.
Stateside, hopefully the Supreme Court will side with privacy rights once those cases wind their way through the courts.
This.
It annoys me to no end when politicians insist that what the GCHQ is doing is legal, which just makes it worse - because it means it's not just a single agency overstepping its bounds and spying on us all, instead it's the entire system which is warped.
[1] Yes I'm aware that the size and complexity of the penal code makes exercising this transparency much, much, much more difficult, but that's a separate (and very important) issue entirely. Same goes for the warping of legislative accountability towards campaign donors.
If the GCHQ is acting in accordance with the law, even if the law is bad, then there is accountability to the public through the Parliament, and presumably the public, if they think the law is bad, can change the behavior by changing the Parliament.
If the GCHQ is doing bad things independently and disregarding the law as adopted by Parliament, then not only are the bad things being done as in the above case, but there is a fundamental breakdown in democratic governance.
Since the problems in the latter are a superset of the problems in the former, I'd say its hard to say that the former is worse.
If the people voted for one law allowing surveillance, then yes, your point is perfectly made. But these behaviors cropped up extra-legislatively through tortured interpretations of existing law, which implies there is a much bigger problem with western liberal governments circa 2014.
I'm not a historian, but this tendency to do a creeping, secret expansion of power based on secret legal interpretations of existing law feels very new, and very insidious, and I believe is actually the greater problem than the surveillance itself, and it's not clear at all that Parliament could pass a law fixing that problem.
So you're saying the UK government held a vote asking "Do you want to be surveilled?" and a majority of citizens answered in the affirmative? I can't remember anything like that happening here in the US.
Don't hold your breath.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2855776/judge-give-nsa-unlimi...
I'm actually heartened by the unanimous decision this past summer where the SC ruled against the carte blanche searching of cell phones when the cops make an arrest. The Chief Justice wrote the opinion and came down hard on the government. He actually wrote "We cannot deny that our decision today will have an impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime...Privacy comes at a cost."
Before a warrant, this non-distinction protects you, because this would be taken as a search of your personal effects.
If there's a search warrant, then the government has the powers to search your effects independent of where they are, so nothing's really changed and it aligns with the spirit of the law (instead of trying to hide behind technicalities).
Look at it this way. If your pot growing operation is visible from your neighbors window (just one person!) we say you can't reasonably expect privacy. Dillon v. Sup. Ct. How can we say data visible to your hundred closest sysadmin friends at CloudCo is private?