You just know in your bones that the NSA spied on you and shared that data with Britain's GCHQ spy agency, right? So how can you confirm this? Through a new online tool offered by the British civil liberties group Privacy International.
Thanks to a legal victory Privacy International obtained earlier this year, the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal is now required to search through data the GCHQ obtained from the NSA for information collected on anyone in the world if that person so requests it. If you request the info and the Tribunal finds something, it must let you know. The catch is you have to make the request before December 5, 2015. Privacy International has made this easy with its "Did GCHQ Illegally Spy on You?" online tool.
Earlier this year the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in the UK ruled that British intelligence services acted unlawfully when they accessed the private communications of millions of people that had been collected by the NSA under its mass-surveillance programs known as PRISM and Upstream and shared with the British spy agency. The PRISM program, which began in 2007, allowed the NSA to collect data in bulk from U.S. companies like Yahoo and Google. The Upstream program involved the collection of data from taps placed on hundreds of undersea cables outside the U.S.
The Tribunal will only search for records shared between the NSA and GCHQ prior to December 2014. And, unfortunately, it won't reveal if the GCHQ obtained data about you on its own and/or shared it with the NSA, or if the NSA spied on you and didn't share that data with GCHQ. The amount of data the Tribunal will search may also be limited.
"Once a claim is filed, the IPT will usually only search GCHQ’s records for unlawful activity during the year before the claim was submitted," Privacy International notes. "What this means is that a claim submitted on 14 September 2015 would lead to records being searched for the time period between 14 September 2014 and 5 December 2014."
There's one other caveat about the request. The Tribunal can only search its data for information about you if you submit details such as your name, email address and phone number. Of course in submitting your email address and phone number, you're potentially providing the British government with information it doesn't already have about you. But, as Privacy International points out in its FAQ about the tool, there's no way around this.
The good news is that if the tribunal does find information collected about you, GCHQ must delete that data once the investigation into your records is done, along with the request form you submitted.
