United Kingdom of surveillance
Despite strongly opposing a similar measure when the
then Labour government introduced it in 2009, the Conservatives and
Liberals who rule Britain today have now proposed their snooper’s
charter. The Communications Data Bill has provoked fierce criticism
across the political spectrum. Under it, the intelligence services and
police will have access, without warrants, to all text messages, phone
calls, emails, and internet connections. Internet users, visitors to
social networking sites, and telephone users will all be subject to
interception or supervision, or both, any or all of the time. Officials
will be able to seek court injunctions against British internet and
telephone companies which fail to comply, and the government has gone
even further than Labour by planning to pay overseas-based firms like
Facebook and Twitter to hand over information on web and mobile phone
use.
The Bill, however, is riddled with problems.
Even an official impact assessment states that significant risks to
privacy are involved. Secondly, it has not been clarified what
additional threat needs to be addressed, not least because the
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 already gives the police and
other bodies vast powers; they have made over 550,000 interception
requests a year.
The 2000 Act, furthermore, is so comprehensive that the
courts have had to stop municipal bodies from engaging in total
surveillance. Thirdly, British ministers now routinely evade
parliamentary scrutiny by using delegated powers to make legislation of
primary importance, and can create even more repressive powers after the
law is on the statute books. Judicial review is also time-barred, and
the British judiciary is usually reluctant to oppose the executive when
the latter cites national security. In addition, the proposed law only
calls for voluntary cooperation by non-U.K. firms, but the £6 billion
the new policy could cost the cash-strapped U.K. government dwarfs the
sums respectively spent even by China and Qadhafi’s Libya on IT
surveillance. Above all, the law could be useless, as those determined
to evade detection could use proxy servers or fake IDs. The British
upper chamber, the House of Lords, severely criticised such measures in
2009, but without a major parliamentary rebellion the plan will become
law. There could be few better examples of the increasing grip of the
security services on the executive. The presumption that all human
beings are potentially suspect is tantamount to governance by a doctrine
of Original Sin.