Investigatory Powers Act legalises range of tools for
snooping and hacking by the security services
The Investigatory Powers Act was passed on Thursday. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
A bill giving the UK intelligence
agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world
has passed into law with barely a whimper, meeting only token resistance over
the past 12 months from inside parliament and barely any from outside.
The
Investigatory Powers Act, passed on Thursday, legalises a whole range of tools
for snooping and hacking by the security services unmatched by any other
country in western Europe or even the US.
The
security agencies and police began the year braced for at least some
opposition, rehearsing arguments for the debate. In the end, faced with public
apathy and an opposition in disarray, the government did not have to make a
single substantial concession to the privacy lobby.
US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted:
“The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of
western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”
Snowden in
2013 revealed the scale of mass surveillance – or bulk data collection as the
security agencies prefer to describe it – by the US National Security Agency
and the UK’s GCHQ, which work in tandem.
But,
against a backdrop of fears of Islamist attacks, the privacy lobby has failed
to make much headway. Even in Germany, with East Germany’s history of mass
surveillance by the Stasi and where Snowden’s revelations produced the most
outcry, the Bundestag recently passed legislation giving the intelligence
agencies more surveillance powers.
The US
passed a modest bill last year curtailing bulk phone data collection but the
victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election is potentially a major
reverse for privacy advocates. On the campaign trail, Trump made comments that
implied he would like to use the powers of the surveillance agencies against
political opponents.
The
Liberal Democrat peer Lord Strasburger, one of the leading voices against the
investigatory powers bill, said: “We do have to worry about a UK Donald Trump.
If we do end up with one, and that is not impossible, we have created the tools
for repression. If Labour had backed us up, we could have made the bill better.
We have ended up with a bad bill because they were all over the place.
“The real Donald
Trump has access to all the data that the British spooks are gathering and we
should be worried about that.”
The
Investigatory Powers Act legalises powers that the security agencies and police
had been using for years without making this clear to either the public or
parliament. In October, the investigatory powers tribunal, the only court that
hears complaints against MI6, MI5 and GCHQ, ruled that they had
been unlawfully collecting massive volumes of confidential personal datawithout proper
oversight for 17 years.
One of the
negative aspects of the legislation is that it fails to provide adequate
protection for journalists’ sources, which could discourage whistleblowing.
One of the few
positives in the legislation is that it sets out clearly for the first time the
surveillance powers available to the intelligence services and the police. It
legalises hacking by the security agencies into computers and mobile phones and
allows them access to masses of stored personal data, even if the person under
scrutiny is not suspected of any wrongdoing.
Privacy groups are
challenging the surveillance powers in the European court of human rights and
elsewhere.
Jim Killock, the
executive director of Open Rights Group, said: “The UK now has a surveillance
law that is more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy. The state has
unprecedented powers to monitor and analyse UK citizens’ communications
regardless of whether we are suspected of any criminal activity.”
Renate Samson,
the chief executive of Big Brother Watch, said: “The passing of the
investigatory powers bill has fundamentally changed the face of surveillance in
this country. None of us online are now guaranteed the right to communicate
privately and, most importantly, securely.”
Trump’s victory
started speculation that, given his warm words for Vladimir Putin, he might do
a deal with the Russian president to have Snowden sent back to the US where he
faces a long jail sentence. Snowden has lived in Russia since leaking tens of
thousands of documents to journalists in 2013.
But Bill Binney,
a former member of the NSA who became
a whistleblower, expressed scepticism: “I am not sure if the relationship a
President Trump would have with President Putin would be bad for Snowden.
“In Russia, he
would still be an asset that maybe Putin would use in bargaining with Trump.
Otherwise, Snowden does have a large support network around the world plus in
the US and Trump may not want to disturb that. Also, I think any move to get
Snowden out of Russia and into US courts would also open up support for at
least three other lawsuits against the US government’s unconstitutional
surveillance.”
This article was
amended on 19 November 2016. The act has not yet received royal assent, as
stated in an earlier version.
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