EDINBURGH, December 8 (Sputnik), Mark Hirst — Mass surveillance programs are expanding more than ever, Icelandic Member of Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir told Sputnik on Monday.
“The extent of the surveillance is not rolling back at all, they are just expanding more than ever and that is quite disturbing,” she said in an exclusive interview with Sputnik.
Jónsdóttir also said that different political tensions across the world often divert international attention away from real threats.
“First we had the ‘War on Terror’, then ISIS and now Russia and all these different escalations in the world are often based on very serious lack of truthfulness about the real danger and the real threat,” Jónsdóttir stated.
According to Jónsdóttir, one of the biggest problems faced by international community is the lack of privacy due to mass surveillance.
“The biggest problem we are faced with in the post-9/11 and post terrorist attacks in Europe is that it has put so much money into this industry of surveillance. So there are these endless contractors who are making all sorts of inventions that ultimately take away our privacy,” she said, adding that it is very difficult to cope with such problem.
On Friday, UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) held that the communications surveillance by the UK government is in line with the country's human rights regulations.
THE IPT’s ruling followed a suit lodged by Amnesty International and other human rights groups against the UK government following leaks by US whistleblower Edward Snowden. The leaks revealed that the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of the United Kingdom together with the US National Security Agency (NSA) were exercising mass surveillance and interception of online and communications data.
