Revelations concerning global surveillance of mass communications data have clearly illustrated the paucity of legal regulation in this area. Surveillance almost inevitably engages the right to privacy but such is the notoriously nebulous nature of privacy, particularly on an international scale, that it fails to provide sufficient safeguards against state abuses of surveillance capacity. In the face of national security concerns privacy appears to be routinely relegated to being an inconvenient obstacle. The capacity of the United States and the United Kingdom to carry out surveillance on an enormous scale has highlighted not only the inadequacies of their own domestic regulatory frameworks but also the ease with which, through modern communications technology, unfettered global surveillance can take place. This article analyses these issues and further considers the normative international regulatory framework that should apply to surveillance if it is to take place according to the rule of law and demo...