Mass Surveillance
Blog
01 May 2025 By Sara Chitseko
Why ‘Predictive’ Policing Must be Banned
The UK Government is trying to use algorithms to predict which people are most likely to become killers using sensetive personal data of hundreds of thousands of people.
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13 March, 2025
Publication
Joint letter: Make the Investigatory Powers Tribunal on Apple Encryption a Public Hearing
Joint letter from Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch and Index on Censorship.
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Blog
03 Mar 2025 By Alexander Dolphin
Queercryption: Safety in Numbers
We deserve to live free from persecution.
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Blog
24 Feb 2025 By Alexander Dolphin
The Case for Encryption
Spying on private messages has long been on the security services’ wish list.
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Blog
13 Feb 2025 By Sara Chitseko
Prevent Duty: Redefining terrorism in the wake of the Southport attacks
On 23 January 2025, 18 year old Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to a minimum of 52 years in prison for the horrific murder of three young girls and the attempted murder of eight other children, as well as two adults who tried to save them.
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Campaign
Safety Not Surveillance
Safety Not Surveillance is a coalition of grassroots and civil society organisations working at the intersections of racial justice, migrant justice, criminal legal system accountability and tech.
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Blog
08 Apr 2024 By Jim Killock
Home Office CCTV: free mass surveillance?
The Home Office has for several years run a programme to supply Mosques, temples and Synagogues with security equipment including CCTV cameras.
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22 February, 2024
Publication
Prevent and the Pre-Crime State: How unaccountable data sharing is harming a generation
Thousands of Prevent referrals are made each year ostensibly to “support people susceptible to radicalisation”.
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Blog
12 Feb 2024 By Sara Chitseko
The case against police body-worn video cameras
A new investigation by the BBC has revealed a shocking incident in which Thames Valley Police officers made “sickening” comments about a woman, filmed semi-naked with police body-worn video cameras.
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Blog
08 Sep 2023 By James Baker and Jim Killock
Omnishambles over encrypted messages continues
At the eleventh hour of the Online Safety Bill’s passage through Parliament, the Government has found itself claiming to have both conceded that it won’t do anything stupid regarding encrypted messages, and that it may well press ahead with dangerous technologies if it wants to.
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Blog
06 Jun 2023 By Jim Killock
Snowden Revelations: Ten Years On
Ten years ago, the first revelations about US mass surveillance were published in the UK and USA.
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Blog
25 May 2023 By Sophia Akram
George Floyd’s Murder, Three Years On: Insitutional Racism Hardwired in Police Tech
Three years ago today, rumblings of a global reckoning on racial injustice took place that led many people to reconsider their own experiences and roles when it came to anti-Blackness and racial discrimination.
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Blog
18 May 2023 By Sophia Akram
Don’t use Beyonce to normalise live facial recognition
Its deployment is nothing more than our demise from democracy.
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Blog
20 Mar 2023 By Sophia Akram
What’s wrong with ‘gang’ surveillance in the UK?
Just over one year ago, ten young Black men were charged with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to GBH in Greater Manchester.
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16 March, 2023
Publication
Manchester 10: Open letter asks Andy Burnham to tackle discriminatory ‘gang’ surveillance
Advocacy groups and human rights organisations have written to the Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, and the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Stephen Watson, to ask them to investigate discriminatory police practices in the wake of the conviction of ten young Black men, known as the Manchester 10.
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Blog
15 Feb 2023 By Sophia Akram
UK Facial Recognition – No Oversight, No Consent
On 3 February 2023, the Wales cross-party group on digital rights and democracy – for which Open Rights Group serves as the secretariat – held its fourth session on surveillance and facial recognition technology in the UK.
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Blog
12 Dec 2022 By Dr Monica Horten
Online Safety Bill: Triple shield or triple surveillance?
Update on the Parliamentary amendments
The Online Safety Bill is back in Parliament.
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Blog
09 Dec 2022 By James Baker
Continuing the campaign against the Online Safety Bill
This week the Online Safety Bill came back to Parliament.
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Blog
24 Nov 2022 By Dr Monica Horten
Global encryption coalition warns of Online Safety Bill dangers
70 organizations, cyber security experts, and elected officials sign open letter expressing dangers of Online Safety Bill
On 24 November, seventy civil society organizations, companies, elected officials, and cybersecurity experts, including Global Encryption Coalition members, published an open letter to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak highlighting their concerns with the threat that the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Bill poses to end-to-end encryption.
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Blog
07 Oct 2022 By Sophia Akram
Young people criminalised for content
It’s a modern-day reality that pretty much anyone can go online today and write what they want with some form of audience available to them – whether that’s Facebook friends, Twitter followers or readers of a personal blog.
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Campaign
Online Safety Bill Policy Hub
The Online Safety Act Policy Hub is a place to find out more about the issues affecting end-to-end encryption and freedom of expression online.
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Blog
04 Aug 2022 By Dr Monica Horten
The Online Safety Bill puts a spy in your pocket
The deployment of client-side scanning on private messaging systems was trailed in a research paper published by the technical directors of GCHQ and the National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC).
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Blog
28 Jun 2022 By Sophia Akram
‘Prevent’ and the attack on free speech
A review of the government’s controversial Prevent duty has been a long time coming.
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Campaign
Save Encryption
Message scanning breaks end-to-end encryption, which puts everyone’s privacy and security at risk.
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Campaign
Court Rules UK Mass Surveillance Programme Unlawful
In 2013, following Edward Snowden’s disclosure of information about major national mass surveillance programmes, the Open Rights Group teamed up with Privacy International, English PEN, and Dr Constanze Kurz, a German computer scientist, to mount a legal challenge against the UK Government’s mass surveillance of the internet.
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Campaign
Court of Appeal rules surveillance data should be restricted
In January 2018, the Court of Appeal delivered judgment in a case regarding the Government’s “Snooper’s Charter” provisions, found in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, and in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.
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