European Court of Human Rights: Personal calls and Internet usage from work are (maybe) protected: A Welsh university employee has successfully sued the UK government in the European Court of Human Rights over surveillance that was conducted while the woman was an employee at Carmarthenshire College. According to the complaint, the woman's e-mail, phone, Internet, and fax usage were all monitored by the Deputy Principal (DP) of the college, who appears to have taken a sharp dislike to her. According to the complaint, the DP believed that the woman was using college facilities for personal use too often, and began collecting evidence about her activity. The woman claimed that her human rights were being abused, and pointed specifically to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (PDF), which governs private and family life.

The woman alleged that the DP began a campaign back in 1999 to discredit her. This campaign involved phone calls to numbers that the applicant had called in an attempt to find out who she had been speaking with, and apparently extended even to reading faxes that she sent to her solicitors from the office.

The case was made tricky by the fact that England lacked two things in 1999: a privacy law and a law governing employers' rights in monitoring their own employees. Because England had no general right to privacy enshrined in the law, the judges might seem to favor the government; but because employers had no law that gave them rights to monitor their workers, Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights became important. That article says that "everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence."

The government argued that the surveillance had been legitimate because it only involved the monitoring of the woman's communications, not the interception of them. That is, phone numbers were retrieved from telephone bills sent to the college, and the IT department logged e-mail addresses and web sites visited, but the contents of the phone calls and the e-mails were not recorded. Further, the government argued that it was pursuing "the legitimate aim of protecting the rights and freedoms of others by ensuring that the facilities provided by a publicly funded employer were not abused."

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(Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)