The argument over the Government’s proposed
communications data bill went nuclear last week when the founder of Wikipedia
compared the planned surveillance of web traffic to that found in Iran and
China.
Jimmy Wales says his legendary site will
encrypt all its Internet connections with the UK if the bill goes ahead.
And Wales is far from alone in his
criticism. Under the new law, mobile phone companies and Internet service
providers will have to keep a record of every email sent, phone call made and
page clicked. That’s an extension of previous powers, which obliged phone
companies to keep records of phone calls and text messages for 12 months.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented
the web, entered the fray last week, warning that the UK would loose its
valuable international reputation as a free web nation. He urged the public to
campaign against the bill.
If Berners-Lee was moderate in his
language, others have not been so measured.
Wales told members of both Houses of
Parliament examining the proposed legislation: "It is not the sort of
thing I'd expect from a western democracy. It is the kind of thing I would
expect from the Iranians or the Chinese and it would be detected immediately by
the Internet industry."
Jim Killock, Executive Director of Open
Rights Group, said: "Bluntly these are as dangerous as we expected, and
represent unprecedented surveillance powers in the democratic world."
Home Secretary Theresa May argues that
burgeoning online crime means law enforcement must follow where cyber criminals
lead them. But industry representatives warned parliamentarians that the very
act of creating such a vast data store would attract those criminals.
Linx, the London Internet Exchange, said a
raid on this stored information – including personal details of millions of UK
internet users – would amount to, ‘a significant threat to national security’.
The same body warned that the Government
would now be in control of a massive ‘profiling engine’, which could ‘represent
a dramatic shift in the balance between personal privacy and the capabilities
of the state to investigate and analyse the citizen’.
You can join campaigns against the bill
becoming law online and read more about the legislation at the Parliament
website.
Links:
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/joint-select/draft-communications-bill/
A couple of campaigns.
http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/campaigns/no-snoopers-charter/no-snoopers-charter.php