UK authorities should not be granted access to data held by American companies because British laws don’t meet human rights obligations, nine nonprofits have said.
In a letter to the US Department of Justice, organisations including Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation set out their concerns about the UK’s surveillance and data retention regimes.
They argue that the nation doesn’t adhere to human rights obligations and commitments, and therefore it should not be allowed to request data from US companies under the CLOUD Act, which Congress slipped into the Omnibus Spending Bill earlier this year.
The law allows US government to sign formal, bilateral agreements with other countries setting standards for cross-border investigative requests for digital evidence related to serious crime and terrorism.
It requires that these countries “adhere to applicable international human rights obligations and commitments or demonstrate respect for international universal human rights”. The civil rights groups say the UK fails to make the grade.
As such, it urged the US administration not to sign an executive order allowing the UK to request access to data, communications content and associated metadata, noting that the CLOUD Act “implicitly acknowledges” some of the info gathered might relate to US folk.
Critics are concerned this could then be shared with US law enforcement, thus breaking the Fourth Amendment, which requires a warrant to be served for the collection of such data.
Setting out the areas in which the UK falls short, the letter pointed to pending laws on counter-terrorism, saying that, as drafted they would “excessively restrict freedom of expression by criminalizing clicking on certain types of online content”.
Robin Edgar
Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft