They want our data | The UK’s Internet Crisis

Edward Snowden said that “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” And, while we may have nothing to hide here at felix, we have plenty to say.

Theresa May first proposed the Communications Data Bill (Snooper’s Charter) back when there were Lib Dems in power to swat it down. But with the political shenanigans of the referendum this June, May has been in the perfect position to pass through a spiritual successor. The Investigatory Powers Act passed last Thursday is, to once again quote Edward Snowden, “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”

This may seem far-fetched until you read a synopsis of what it provides. It allows intelligence agencies to carry out targeted and bulk interception of communications. It bans only the tapping of MP’s phones along with those of other protected professions. It forces Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to hold on to a user’s visited top-level domains for one year, e.g. google. com or wikipedia. org, but not specific pages. It allows police and intelligence officers to see these records without warrants. It allows police and intelligence officers to hack into specific devices and bulk hack into equipment for national security matters. It puts in place legal obligation for ISPs to help in the mass data collection and hacking. It makes it illegal for an ISP, or someone working at one, to reveal what data has been requested. So you probably don’t want to piss off that one friend headed to Cheltenham this summer.

Surprisingly, there is at least one benefit to all of this: we now have a far more accurate picture of what GCHQ is doing, and exactly what acts they justify with the organisation-wide motto “Necessary and Proportional”. I don’t think I need to explain why having a warehouse of sensitive data on everyone at a single location might not be the best idea. Especially given the impact of leaked emails in the recent American election.

We still have no idea how effective these kind of measures are for actually protecting against threats to national security – the Paris attacks were organised by unencrypted text messages and that still wasn’t picked up on. Enacting this may just lead people onto harder encryption like Tor. And while this should be a discussion over civil liberty it has been estimated that these plans will cost well over a billion pounds.

Even more recently, as part of the proposed Digital Economy Bill, the government would tell ‘adult’ websites to add age verification checks at the risk of being blocked for not complying. On top of this, service providers would be forced to block sites with content that the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) deems not suitable for commercial DVD sale. This would enforce some hybrid of the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 and agreements with film publishers, including the amazing “four finger rule” (four being the maximum number of digits allowed in an orifice).

You may not care about your exotic pornography as much as the felix editor, but having a system in place to gate or ban specific websites based on their content is terrifying. Porn is embarrassing, and an easy starting place to begin restricting what people have access to. A likely age gating system would involve debit card numbers, which just adds to the backlog of government information on what everyone’s doing. It also encourages people to enter very stealable information into shady websites.

Bans can be circumvented with tools such as VPNs, proxies and encryption, which could give cause to ban those as well, which is worrying since these tools are a keystone of modern journalism and whistleblowing. It is not difficult to imagine a future where satire comes under attack. There have already been cases of people being arrested for tweets and Youtube videos that were clearly jokes, being deemed offensive.

I’m not saying that we are suddenly in some Orwellian dystopia, I’m just worried that we are one step closer to one. But before you whip out your tinfoil hats remember that the European court could still overturn this. Oh, wait...