SWEEPING UK SPY BILL DUBBED 'SNOOPERS' CHARTER' BECOMES LAW
SWEEPING UK SPY BILL DUBBED 'SNOOPERS' CHARTER' BECOMES
LAW
BY JILL LAWLESS ASSOCIATED PRESS Nov 26, 8:06 AM EST
LONDON (AP) -- In Britain, Big Brother just got bigger.
After months of wrangling, Parliament has passed a
contentious new snooping law that gives authorities - from police and spies to
food regulators, fire officials and tax inspectors - powers to look at the
internet browsing records of everyone in the country.
The law requires telecoms companies to keep records of
all users' web activity for a year, creating databases of personal information
that the firms worry could be vulnerable to leaks and hackers.
Civil liberties groups say the law establishes mass surveillance
of British citizens, following innocent internet users from the office to the
living room and the bedroom.
Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with
inventing World Wide Web, tweeted news of the law's passage with the words:
"Dark, dark days."
The Investigatory Powers Bill - dubbed the
"snoopers' charter" by critics - was passed by Parliament this month
after more than a year of debate and amendments. It will become law when it
receives the formality of royal assent next week. But big questions remain
about how it will work, and the government acknowledges it could be 12 months
before internet firms have to start storing the records.
"It won't happen in a big bang next week," Home
Office official Chris Mills told a meeting of internet service providers on
Thursday. "It will be a phased program of the introduction of the measures
over a year or so."
The government says the new law "ensures powers are
fit for the digital age," replacing a patchwork of often outdated rules
and giving law-enforcement agencies the tools to fight terrorism and serious
crime.
In a move taken by few other nations, it requires
telecommunications companies to store for a year the web histories known as
internet connection records - a list of websites each person has visited and
the apps and messaging services they used, though not the individual pages they
looked at or the messages they sent.
The government has called that information the modern
equivalent of an itemized phone bill. But critics say it's more like a personal
diary.
Julian Huppert, a former Liberal Democrat lawmaker who
opposed the bill, said it "creates a very intrusive database."
"People may have been to the Depression Alliance
website, or a marriage guidance website, or an abortion provider's website, or
all sorts of things which are very personal and private," he said.
Officials won't need a warrant to access the data, and
the list of bodies that can see it includes not just the police and
intelligence services, but government departments, revenue and customs
officials and even the Food Standards Agency.
"My worry is partly about their access,"
Huppert said. "But it's much more deeply about the prospects for either
hacking or people selling information on."
James Blessing, chairman of the Internet Services
Providers Association, said the industry has "significant questions"
on how the law will work - including "how to keep the vast new data sets
secure."
He warned that if the law is not implemented in a
"proportionate, considered way, there is a real danger the U.K. could lose
its status as a world-leading digital economy."
Some aspects of the new law remain clouded by secrecy.
Not all internet companies will have to comply - only those that are asked to
by the government. The government won't say who is on that list, and the firms
involved are forbidden from telling their customers.
Service providers are also concerned by the law's
provision that firms can be asked to remove encryption to let spies access communications.
Internet companies say that could weaken the security of online shopping,
banking and a host of other activities that rely on encryption.
The new law also makes official - and legal - British
spies' ability to hack into devices and harvest vast amounts of bulk online
data, much of it from outside the U.K. In doing so, it both acknowledges and
sets limits on the secretive mass-snooping schemes exposed by former U.S.
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The government says the law incorporates protections
against intrusion, including an investigatory powers commissioner to oversee
the system, and judges to scrutinize government-approved warrants to hack into
electronic devices or look at the content of communications.
David Anderson, a lawyer who serves as Britain's
independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said the new law "creates
powerful new safeguards" and "achieves world-leading standards of
transparency by putting on a detailed statutory basis all the powers which police
and intelligence agencies already use."
Privacy groups battled to stop the new legislation, and
now say they will challenge it in court. But public opposition has been muted,
in part because the bill's passage through Parliament has been overshadowed by
Britain's vote to leave the European Union and the upheaval that has followed.
Renate Samson, chief executive of the group Big Brother
Watch, said it would take time for the full implications of the law to become
clear to the public.
"We now live in a digital world. We are digital
citizens," Samson said. "We have no choice about whether or not we
engage online.
"This bill has fundamentally changed how we are able
to privately and securely communicate with one another, communicate with
business, communicate with government and live an online life. And that's a
real, profound concern."
© 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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