Personally I think it is better to have tight laws that are sometimes broken than loose laws that authorize anything. I understand that there are situations where agents may have to break the law and should have a reasonable defence against prosecution (akin to self defence). Instead we get this world in which these grey areas are ignored to the detriment of everyone.

There are a lot of legal exemptions for agencies, but they are well aware they're not above the law. The public scrutiny will create genuine headaches for them, and I can guarantee you right now that there are a lot of people whose sole job is to ensure that they meet directives.

They're not gonna change international agreements over it though.

I am surprised that people on HN aren't seeing this for the genuine victory it is; only law can bind these entities, and it's not a quick process. This is the process working, as well as it ever does (for ill and good).

I agree. They think they're following UK law. Here's an article from Grauniad which supports that: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/legal-loopholes-gc...

> The briefings, which are entitled UK Operational Legalities, stress that GCHQ "is an organisation with a highly responsible approach to compliance with the law".

> GCHQ also has a well staffed legal team, known as OPP-LEG, to help staff navigate their way through the complexities of the law.

> But there appears to be some nervousness about Tempora. In a paper written for National Security Agency (NSA) analysts entitled A Guide to Using Internet Buffers at GCHQ, the author notes: "[Tempora] represents an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ's special source data.

> "As large-scale buffering of metadata and content represent a new concept for GCHQ's exploitation of the internet, GCHQ's legal and policy officers are understandably taking a careful approach to their access and use."

It's easy to keep the appearance of following the law when you're a secret organisation on a mission, with little public oversight. And unlike organised crime, intelligence services don't have to rely on blackmail to get a direct line to the executive and legislation.

Admit to the stuff that's legal, make the stuff that's borderline a political issue, make excuses for the stuff that was illegal then retroactively legalise it, all the while relying on the bottom end of the iceberg being secret for long enough that you've got time to destroy the evidence or nobody cares anymore.

I'm sure that's how it works, it's not even malicious, it's just tribalism. It's why we institute transparency and accountability in most other places. Give your local library enough funding and remove all the oversight and in 10 years it'll have a bunch of skeletons in the closet and a "well staffed legal team to help them navigate their way through the complexities of the law."

That's not an unreasonable position, but consider this counterpoint: in the long run, there is more danger in people thinking it's sometimes okay to break laws, than in allowing whatever conduct was going to inevitably happen.

It seems like the problem is you've got one of these: Low false positives, low false negatives, simple laws; pick two.

To which some people are going to say that we shouldn't have simple laws, but that's really not a good alternative. Even if the law says exactly what you want (which is Hard), the administrative burden of following and enforcing laws that complicated can exceed the benefits.

So if you're stuck choosing between false positives and false negatives, the libertarian position falls out pretty quickly. Because in order to provide deterrence and account for less than 100% enforcement, the penalties for breaking the law are generally much higher than the societal cost of the crime, which means that the government convicting a good person has a much higher societal cost than the government not convicting a bad person. In other words, the laws should err on the side of things not being illegal.

But you're applying this to government action. And there are certainly things government officers can do that justify removing them from the general population and to which the same principle applies. But we have another alternative in this case, which is to remove them from the government. The burden for firing government officers should be a lot lower than for putting them in prison, which means we should reasonably do it a lot more aggressively when there is even the slightest hint of misconduct.

* Until such time as we can fix this mess.

I understand that GCHQ, while not admitting to the existence of TEMPORA in public, is being careful with it, providing in-house lawyers for their staff to operate within what they think the law says.

So this ruling only changes the "We spy on your citizens; you spy on ours" work-around to various laws making it hard to spy on your own citizens. Since the English laws are pretty clear and should be easy enough for GCHQ to work with it's not much change on our side.