BIG BROTHER WATCH AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT
equipment through which the communication was transmitted. Furthermore,
any intrusion occasioned by the acquisition of related communications data
will be magnified when they are obtained in bulk, since they are now
capable of being analysed and interrogated so as to paint an intimate picture
of a person through the mapping of social networks, location tracking,
Internet browsing tracking, mapping of communication patterns, and insight
into who a person interacted with (see paragraph 317 above).
343. More importantly, however, in Weber and Saravia and Liberty and
Others the Court did not expressly address the fact that it was dealing with
surveillance of a different nature and scale from that considered in previous
cases. Nonetheless, targeted interception and bulk interception are different
in a number of important respects.
344. To begin with, bulk interception is generally directed at
international communications (that is, communications physically travelling
across State borders), and while the interception and even examination of
communications of persons within the surveilling State might not be
excluded, in many cases the stated purpose of bulk interception is to
monitor the communications of persons outside the State’s territorial
jurisdiction, which could not be monitored by other forms of surveillance.
For example, the German system aims only to monitor foreign
telecommunications outside of German territory (see paragraph 248 above).
In Sweden, the intercept material cannot relate to signals where both the
sender and recipient are in Sweden (see today’s judgment in the case of
Centrum för rättvisa v. Sweden (application no. 35252/08)).
345. Moreover, as already noted, the purposes for which bulk
interception may be employed would appear to be different. In so far as the
Court has considered targeted interception, it has, for the most part, been
employed by respondent States for the purposes of investigating crime.
However, while bulk interception may be used to investigate certain serious
crimes, Council of Europe member States operating a bulk interception
regime appear to use it for the purposes of foreign intelligence gathering,
the early detection and investigation of cyberattacks, counter-espionage and
counter-terrorism (see paragraphs 303, 308 and 323 above).
346. While bulk interception is not necessarily used to target specified
individuals, it evidently can be – and is – used for this purpose. However,
when this is the case, the targeted individuals’ devices are not monitored.
Rather, individuals are “targeted” by the application of strong selectors
(such as their email addresses) to the communications intercepted in bulk by
the intelligence services. Only those “packets” of the targeted individuals’
communications which were travelling across the bearers selected by the
intelligence services will have been intercepted in this way, and only those
intercepted communications which matched either a strong selector or
complex query could be examined by an analyst.
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