So Much for Freedom

When this Government came to power two years ago it promised action to protect our rights and freedoms but that was all a load of bull. Todays Queens speech introduced a draft bill, if not stopped will allow the Government to know who you are talking and when, where you go on the internet and what sites you visit without any meaningful safeguards. 

Currently under EU and UK  legislation  basic information is stored by Internet Service Providers (ISP's) which can be accessed by police, intelligence agencies or other public bodies simply by a senior official within the organisation signing the request off.  If this wasn't bed enough, given no prior warrant is required, the Government is purposing to strengthening the laws to cover social networking sites, online telephone services, instant messenger, web browsing records and other communication media, in real time. It claims that current legislation is not strong enough.

Concerned about the public backlash the Government say will introduce are a  number of safeguards which they hope will allay fears about the plans. They include: 

• A 12-month limit on how long data can be retained 
• Measures to prevent unauthorised access 
• Strengthening independent oversight 
• Boosting the role of tribunals to consider complaints

They also claim that the content of the communications won't be held, just details of when conversations took place, for how long and where someone was when the communication took place. Intelligence agencies, police  and other public bodies would also have the power to be able to see which websites someone had visited and when, how long they spent on a particular site, and in theory where they were at the time. By linking other surveillance technologies they could even watch you doing it.

Civil liberties groups claim it is a "huge increase" in the level of government surveillance of the general population. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, is reported as saying "People need to be suspected before they're put under surveillance – that's how the law should work, but what the government's saying is: 'Were going to treat you all as suspects, and ask you to trust us not to abuse that data'". He went on to say "These are very dangerous measures – they cross a line, they take us from targeting people that we suspect, to targeting everybody and really lowering the barriers of what the government can find out about you without going through a court."

In a Liberal Democrate Policy Briefing entitled "Your Freedom" it said this about the pervious Governments plans to introduce a internet surveillance law: 

End plans to spy on your email and internet use. Labour want companies to store information about your email and internet use – even storing data about what you do on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. This is a huge waste of money and time, which we will scrap. We will ensure your private data is kept safe.

If they vote for this legislation then they will go against what the party has stood for many year years, the basic freedom of the people not to be spied upon by the state without due reason under law. Their claim that: 

The Liberal Democrats are the only party that believes in a fairer, freer Britain, where everyone gets fair treatment and everyone’s privacy is respected.

This will be meaningless and show them to be no better than the Conservatives that want to turn this country in to a police state which Chinese Government would be proud of. Any self respecting Liberal needs to make sure that this law is stopped or are least watered down and proper safeguards put in place to make sure warrants  are in place before any information is given to any government body or authority. Clearly even allowing this to be debated shows the leadership for what they really are, puppets of the Conservative administration.

The Labour party have to see the errors of their ways and instead of supporting the Government stop this bill in it's tracks and protect people civil liberties and stop the state snooping on people without due cause to the law. Prior warrants should be required before ant interception of communication by the state is allowed and they should push for these if they are to give support for such measures. Better still they will vote against it altogether.

Thankfully there are those in parliament including members of the Conservatives including Boris Johnson and David Davis as well as a number of Liberal Democrat members of parliament. One of the biggest supporters for opposition to the bill is David Davis, a former Shadow Home Secretary and Chairman of the Conservative Party. He has spoken out about bill. He labelled it a snoopers charter and said recently "it will turn us into nation of suspects".

David Davis revealed today in parliament that the Government has already been in talks with the ISP's , and reports in the press claim the Government are planning talks with Facebook, Google and other tech giants to discuss what the bill would do to them, like it is some kind of done deal. David Davis pointed out, in a press interview, a side effect of the bill would be that “there will not be another whistle-blower in this country unless they are on career suicide.” as anyone who thought they would be able to offer up important information anonymously would not be able to do so if the bill was to become law. At the end of the day the implications of this bill are massive.

There is the question will it actually work to catch organised criminals and the terrorists that grab the headlines in the Conservative Press? The fact is, it probably won't as Sir Chris Fox, a former president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, pointed out when he said that mass surveillance simply wouldn't work. He pointed out that mistakes would be made and such a system "won't catch top-level criminals and terrorists because they'll stop using that process". There are ways around the system that people will use. So many that it would be hard to plug the gaps.

There are also questions as if the data can be collected without revealing the content of the communication itself. Digital Forensic experts have said that splitting the header information, for example, to whom a communication took place to, would be difficult separate from the contents of the communication itself. This is because many sites use encrypted communications, such as webmail services and even Facebook. In fact the encryption itself make it impossible to look at without massive computing resources use brute force techniques.

The cost of such surveillance could be high. Estimates range in the billions of pounds to the tens of billions of pounds, plus annual running costs running into millions. The question is, is it worth it. In a time when people are losing their jobs in the public sector the is it right the government purpose spending sums of money on trying to catch people that will just find new ways to communicate that gets around the measures in the purposed bill. As Sir Chris Fox, basically said, there will always be terrorist attack and organised crime but you have to balance that against the freedom of the individual. This bill goes to far and will cost too much.

If you thought that what the News of the World in the phone hacking scandal was wrong that is nothing to what the Government is planning. My position is clear and I agree with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, who called the plan "a destruction of human rights".  It is an attack on a individuals right to privacy, freedom of communication and association and it is morally wrong. When combined with other surveillance system it has the potential to be the biggest attack on an individuals privacy in British Histroy. What is worse is there are no mention who these other public bodies might be, they could be anyone!