Legal threats in the United Kingdom

The National Union of Journalists in the United Kingdom and Ireland is the only independent, collective and representative voice for media workers in both countries. The union was founded in 1907 and has 30,000 members representing staff, freelance and student journalists working at home and abroad in broadcasting, newspapers, news agencies, magazines, books and online. The category of Secondary Disclosure includes journalists and media workers because they receive information from a primary source and they make an unauthorised publication of the information. In September 2018, in a successful challenge to the Investigatory Powers Act, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that mass surveillance, without adequate media safeguards, was unlawful.