Big Brother Watch


Big Brother Watch is a non-profit non-party British civil liberties and privacy campaigning organisation. It was founded in 2009 to campaign against state surveillance and threats to civil liberties.
The organisation campaigns on a variety of issues including: the rise of the surveillance state, police use of oppressive technology, freedom and privacy online, the use of intrusive communications interception powers including the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and the Investigatory Powers Act, the protection of personal information and wider data protection issues.
The organisation is headquartered in the China Works building, Vauxhall, London.
The name "Big Brother Watch" originates from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949.

Founding

The group was established in late 2009 and the official launch took place in January 2010 with Tony Benn and David Davis as guest speakers. Silkie Carlo is the Director.
The founder, Matthew Elliott, also founded Eurosceptic think tank Business for Britain as well as Conservative Friends of Russia, Taxpayers Alliance, the NOtoAV campaign in the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum and in 2015, Elliot became the chief executive of Vote Leave.

Reports and campaigns

The organisation has campaigned against police retention of innocent people's custody images and police use of facial recognition technology. In 2018 they supported a debate in the House of Lords which noted the intrusive nature of this technology, the lack of a legal basis or parliamentary scrutiny, and the possibility that it may be incompatible with Article 8 right to privacy under the ECHR. In July 2018, the organisation brought a legal challenge against the Metropolitan Police Service and the Secretary of State for the Home Department.
Big Brother Watch has also campaigned to protect victims of crime from 'digital strip searches' of their mobile phones by police, especially victims of sexual violence. They campaigned alongside other rights and justice groups including End Violence Against Women, Rape Crisis England and Wales and the Centre for Women's Justice.
In 2019, Big Brother Watch investigated and succeeded in getting HM Revenue and Customs to delete over 5 million people's voice biometrics, which had been collected without people's consent or knowledge, in breach of data protection laws, from a HMRC database. It is believed to be the biggest ever deletion of biometric IDs from a state-held database.
In 2017, Big Brother Watch took a case against the United Kingdom, together with Open Rights Group and English PEN, to the European Court of Human Rights arguing that UK surveillance laws infringed UK citizens' right to privacy.
Big Brother Watch was part of the anti-surveillance coalition Don't Spy On Us, which campaigned against the proposed bulk communications collection powers and lack of judicial safeguards in the Investigatory Powers Bill, now Investigatory Powers Act, in 2015 and 2016.
The organisation has published reports investigating police access to people's personal mobile phone information, police use of body worn cameras, surveillance technology in schools and the use of outdated communications laws to prosecute internet speech.
In 2012, Big Brother Watch shut down its website in protest at the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act proposed United States legislation, warning that similar plans may be proposed in the UK. It has carried out investigations into local authority data handling, finding more than 1000 incidents in which councils lost information about children and those in care.

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