BIG BROTHER WATCH AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT
purpose. The closely related issue of whether there existed sufficient
guarantees to ensure that the interception was necessary or justified is
therefore as important as the degree of precision with which the grounds on
which authorisation may be given are defined. Consequently, in the Court’s
view, a regime which permits bulk interception to be ordered on relatively
wide grounds may still comply with Article 8 of the Convention, provided
that, when viewed as a whole, sufficient guarantees against abuse are built
into the system to compensate for this weakness.
371. In the United Kingdom, while the grounds on which bulk
interception could be authorised were formulated in relatively broad terms,
they still focused on national security as well as serious crime and the
economic well-being of the country so far as those interests were also
relevant to the interests of national security (see paragraph 368 above). The
Court will therefore turn to consider the other safeguards built in to the
section 8(4) regime in order to determine whether, when viewed as a whole,
it was compliant with Article 8 of the Convention.
‒ 2. The circumstances in which an individual’s communications may be
intercepted
372. Paragraph 6.2 of the IC Code (see paragraph 96 above) clearly
stated that “[i]n contrast to section 8(1), a section 8(4) warrant does not
name or describe the interception subject or set of premises in relation to
which the interception is to take place. Neither does section 8(4) impose an
express limit on the number of external communications which may be
intercepted”. In other words, the communications bearers were targeted
rather than the devices from which the communications were sent, or the
senders or recipients of the communications. In the absence of any limit on
the number of communications which could have been intercepted, it would
appear that all packets of communications flowing across the targeted
bearers while the warrant was in force were intercepted.
373. That being said, a section 8(4) warrant was a warrant for the
interception of external communications (see paragraph 72 above) and
paragraph 6.7 of the IC Code (see paragraph 96 above) required the
intercepting agency conducting interception under a section 8(4) warrant to
use its knowledge of the way in which international communications were
routed, combined with regular surveys of relevant communications links, to
identify those individual communications bearers that were most likely to
contain external communications that met the description of material
certified by the Secretary of State. The intercepting agency was also
required to conduct the interception in ways that limited the collection of
non-external communications to the minimal level compatible with the
objective of intercepting wanted external communications. The bearers were
not, therefore, chosen at random. On the contrary, they were selected
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