Alan Travis and Owen Bowcott report:
The regime under which UK intelligence agencies, including MI5 and MI6, have been monitoring conversations between lawyers and their clients for the past five years is unlawful, the British government has admitted.
[…]
The admission that the regime surrounding state snooping on legally privileged communications has also failed to comply with the European convention on human rights comes in advance of a legal challenge, to be heard early next month, in which the security services are alleged to have unlawfully intercepted conversations between lawyers and their clients to provide the government with an advantage in court.
The case is due to be heard before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). It is being brought by lawyers on behalf of two Libyans, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, who, along with their families, were abducted in a joint MI6-CIA operation and sent back to Tripoli to be tortured by Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2004.
Read more on The Guardian.
I suppose that compared to the above, revelations about Lenovo may not seem quite as bad, but there’s been serious concerns raised about Lenovo pre-installing Superfish on its laptops. As Zelijka Zorz reports:
If you have recently bought a new Lenovo computer, you’re in for a nasty surprise: the company has been shipping them with pre-installed adware.
And, what’s even worse, the software in question is also using MITM SSL certificates, which is made possible by the installation of a self-signing certificate authority. This allows the company behind the malware to intercept secure connections and collect the unencrypted data, as a poster on the Lenovo forums showed.
Read more on Help Net Security and The Next Web.