THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT’S controversial attempt to pass sweeping new surveillance powers was debated in Parliament for the first time Tuesday, with opposition politicians raising privacy concerns and calling for significant changes to the plans.
The government’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill — the so-called snoopers’ charter — was published in November last year. If passed into law in its current form, it would mandate a data retention regime unprecedented in any Western democracy, forcing internet companies to store records showing every website visited by every person in the U.K. for a period of 12 months. The bill also codifies powers that would allow British security agencies to conduct large-scale hacks of computer networks, and it will also hand spies the power to secretly monitor journalists and their sources, as The Intercept has previously reported.
During Tuesday’s debate in Parliament, the government’s home secretary, Theresa May (pictured above), defended the proposed law, stating that it was “world-leading legislation” necessary to combat terrorism threats. However, Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Scottish National Party representatives criticized the bill and vowed not to support it unless it is rewritten in several areas.
“The truth is we are some way from finding a consensus in the form that this legislation should take,” said Labour’s Andy Burnham. “We’ve recognized the country needs a new law, but I’ve also said that the government’s bill is not yet worthy of support. There are significant weaknesses in this bill.”
Following the debate, there was set to be a vote to pass the bill to the next stage of parliamentary scrutiny. The Labour and Scottish National parties both said they would abstain, while the Liberal Democrats announced they would vote against the bill, calling the proposed legislation “awful.” However, the governing Conservative party, which has a narrow majority of members in the Parliament, will almost certainly obtain enough votes to move the bill forward.
The months ahead will see the continuation of a heated debate around the government’s proposals, which have faced severe criticism in recent weeks. On Tuesday, 200 legal experts signed a letter in The Guardian asserting that the Investigatory Powers Bill “fails to meet international standards for surveillance powers” and “may be illegal.”
Earlier in March, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to privacy criticized the draft law as “disproportionate,” and said that it would “undermine the spirit of the very right to privacy.”
Meanwhile, three separate British parliamentary reports have raised concerns about the scope of the broad surveillance plans. In February, one of the committees that scrutinized the plans made 86 detailed recommendations for improvements and said that the government had “a significant amount of further work to do before Parliament can be confident that the provisions have been fully thought through.”
Update: March 15, 2016, 15:30 ET
As expected, members of Parliament have voted in favor of the surveillance bill. It was approved by 281 votes to 15 and will now move to the next stage of parliamentary scrutiny — known as the “committee stage” — during which the legislation will be debated in detail and various amendments proposed.
Any article on UK surveillance needs to point out the differences in UK and US law, as many assume that the two countries are very similar. Actually, they could not be more different.
The US has a constitution with a Bill of Rights, and it is this Bill of Rights that is the foundation for the Supreme Court consistently enforcing protection from improper surveillance. The UK has nothing similar.
In the US, all power is held by the people except that which the people delegate to the government. In the UK, ultimate power is held by the government (i.e., the sovereign) and the people hold only the rights permitted by the sovereign. If the sovereign decided to put a camera in every British home, then a camera would go in every British home. There is no constitution, law, official or court that could prevent it.
There were very good reasons that the colonial Americans chose to fight off an overbearing English government. The structure of the UK government has changed little since then.
I write this because often (too often) Americans see the UK as some sort of older and wiser brother, and if the UK does something then that must mean that it is acceptable, legal or wise for the US to do it also. A good journalist should inform readers that this is not the case.
The information pertaining to the surveilling and monitoring of the journalists and their sources is truly terrifying…
Obviously, in the UK we’ve had precursor legislation to the Snoopers’ Charter, not least of which was RIPA, a framework sold as something that would put legislative controls on investigatory actions. PR at the time suggested that this sort of thing would only be used in the most grievous and dangerous cases.
Then the Freedom of Information Act came along and we discovered that among the many abuses to which RIPA was actually recorded as being used, one was by local governments concerned that parents were lying about their address details in an attempt to get their child a place in a school of the parents’ choice. We literally couldn’t make this stuff up.
Ultimately I think the issue is actually less about the need for surveillance powers. Sadly there will always be those intent on causing harm to others, parties which will include the imbalanced, criminals and even foreign governments.
The issue is that the use of such power, without meaningful control, places an insurmountable hurdle in front of the people of a nation – i.e. those being governed. It places a near-vertical tilt on the playing field – in favour of the government of the day. The power it gives the state is and should be terrifying.
More importantly, however, since the death of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of US Special Forces, we learned that the world’s most feared terrorist had sufficient OpSec awareness to not even have a phone line at his residence. With this being the case, why should we suppose that any terrorist operating today would be stupid enough to use modern electronics? Worse, we’ve learned from Snowden that surveillance has left targeted profiling far behind and is now effectively treating everyone as a suspect.
That’s simply terrifying in itself.
Like it or not, we as private citizens are now all being negatively influenced by what we perceive as a threat. Whether we are willing to admit it or not, our behaviour patterns have changed as a result of Snowden’s disclosures and our awareness of state monitoring. In that literal and very real sense, the state has become the biggest terrorist of all.
You have been to kind to the opposition, making it sound like they care about people’s privacy. Perhaps the Lib Dems do, but Labour introduced Tempora in the first place and Andy Burnham said that we shouldn’t call the IP bill a “snooper’s charter” and its provisions mass surveillance powers because insulting to hardworking government wiretappers.
Andy Burnham’s modifications would preserve the mass wiretapping, or collection as they insist on calling it. His changes would merely change the rules about when the data can be accessed and by whom, which we all know isn’t meaningful because no one breaks the law more than classified wings of government, nor does anyone get away with it so frequently.
Do you not realize that these snooping powers are vital to the UK Conservative Government as they can be used to help monitor the activities of disabled people, so that the Tories can ensure that disability benefits are being targeted correctly and not being misappropriated. The cost of implementing the snoopers charter can be paid for by a further later purge on the benefits of disabled people to compliment the £4.4 billion disability benefit cuts announced in yesterday’s budget. They can surely do without such luxuries as wheel chairs, sticks, zimmer frames and stair lifts. The provisions to spy on journalists will also help wipe out any dissent or revelations of vicious austerity policies which transfer money from cuts the weakest and most vulnerable members of society to fund further tax cuts for the wealthy. Helping to prevent such unfair and highly critical and damaging reports being published like :
Disabled Tory : Osborne is robbing vulnerable Sky News
http://news.sky.com/story/1661319/disabled-tory-osborne-is-robbing-vulnerable
The £4.4 billion disability benefit cuts by” Fizzy Rascal” Osborne are perfectly fair – it is time people came to their senses, and realized that these dreadful disabled people partying on pleasure Island are living the high life, and its time their partying was curtailed.
Lets all sing along to Dizzy’s song – perhaps Cameron and Osborne could do a duet cover. Lets share the Tories dirty love :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XY75HHjb5c
THE TIME WILL COME when your tax rate will be less if you voluntarily agree to be monitored (surveilled, spied upon, watched like a hawk, have every living moment of your life recorded reported digested and evaluated) if you simply agree to have cams and mics placed all over your domicile, auto, and coms.
You will even be able to select your tax discount by choosing your level of privacy violation. Take an extra .5% off for showerspy!
Sadly I don’t foresee tax cuts being awarded for citizens who choose the privacy violation level to allow the British Government a showercam, as they have the forthcoming Internet of Things to help track and monitor your in home activities. Also a showerspy privacy violation is unlikely to be provided as an option with such a generous 5% tax rebate as you have suggested, since the British Government’s GCHQ has already been spying and capturing “millions of intimate web chats” for free and without the need to offer tax cuts :
“UK spied on millions of intimate webcam chats” Aljazeera
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/02/uk-spied-millions-intimate-webcam-chats-201422719563482970.html
The abolishment of Privacy where only the fascist law enforcement desguised as democratic has the right to their own privacy and no one else and where the constitutional rule of law is a fetishizement. Disgusting is short. – Alejandro Grace Ararat.
I believe it’s only a fetishizement if you are the one violating said constitutional law, otherwise you’re a criminal terrorist who needs to be locked in a dungeon and surveilled without any right to legal counsel for the entirety of your life.
code of the entire usa-governance= malign Fetishizement of/with the constitutional rule of law, encryption and the abolishment of privacy. – Alejandro Grace Ararat.
(its entire law enforcement included) Disgusting is short the land of the free?
You misspelled Labour.
Does ‘internet companies’ only mean ISPs? What about VPN providers who have servers in the UK?
Democracy in action. What’s the alternative?
This is not democracy – its abuse of power, and oppression.
In any case the Conservative’s do not respect the electorate, cannot be trusted, and have even broken their own manifesto promises. They pledged in their manifesto to place a cap on the care home fees of the elderly, and then once elected they “quietly shelved the plans :
Jeremy Hunt’s U-turn on social care ‘cost taxpayer £100m’ The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/25/jeremy-hunt-backlash-axing-elderly-care-cap-policyl
#BDSUK