This week, the highest body of the European Court of Human Rights heard arguments against the mass surveillance programs of two countries, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
The legal proceedings in the two cases started years before, in 2008 and 2013, respectively, with the litigation eventually reaching the court’s highest body, the ECHR Grand Chamber, who heard them one after the other, in succession on Wednesday, July 10.
Both cases made similar arguments, asserting that the signals intelligence programs in the two respective countries set up mass surveillance operations to intercept all citizens’ communications, kept the programs secret, and ran them — and continue to run them — without proper oversight and checks and balances in place.
