BIG BROTHER WATCH AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT States’ administration stated that the programme was regulated under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”), and applications for access to material through PRISM had to be approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”). 24. Documents from the NSA leaked by Edward Snowden suggested that GCHQ had access to PRISM since July 2010 and used it to generate intelligence reports. GCHQ acknowledged that it acquired information from the United States’ which had been obtained via PRISM. 2. Upstream 25. According to the leaked documents, the Upstream programme allowed the collection of content and communications data from fibre optic cables and infrastructure owned by United States’ CSPs. This programme had broad access to global data, in particular that of non-US citizens, which could then be collected, stored and searched using keywords (for further details, see paragraphs 261-264 below). III. DOMESTIC PROCEEDINGS IN THE FIRST AND SECOND OF THE JOINED CASES 26. The applicants in the first of the joined cases (application no. 58170/13) sent a pre-action protocol letter to the Government on 3 July 2013 setting out their complaints and seeking declarations that sections 1 and 3 of the Intelligence Services Act 1994 (“the ISA” – see paragraphs 108 and 110 below), section 1 of the Security Services Act 1989 (“the SSA” – see paragraph 106 below) and section 8 of RIPA (see paragraph 66 below) were incompatible with the Convention. In their reply of 26 July 2013, the Government stated that the effect of section 65(2) of RIPA was to exclude the jurisdiction of the High Court in respect of human rights complaints against the intelligence services, but that the applicants’ complaints could have been raised before the IPT. The IPT was a specialised Tribunal established under RIPA to hear allegations by citizens of wrongful interference with their communications as a result of conduct covered by that Act, and it was endowed with exclusive jurisdiction to investigate any complaint that a person’s communications had been intercepted and, where interception had occurred, to examine the authority for such interception (see paragraphs 122-133 below). However, no further action was taken by these applicants. 27. The applicants in the second of the joined cases (application no. 62322/14) did not bring any domestic proceedings as they did not believe that they had an effective remedy for their Convention complaints. 6