Enhanced surveillance powers provoke ominous warnings
Civil liberties campaigners have criticised a range of enhanced surveillance powers for Britain’s security services contained within the Investigatory Powers Act, which came into law last Thursday.
The act gives UK security services and police the widest surveillance powers in western Europe and the US after passing through parliament unchallenged but came in for visceral criticism from renegade US whistleblower Edward Snowden, who tweeted: “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”
The UK has just legalized the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes farther than many autocracies. https://t.co/yvmv8CoHrj
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 17, 2016
These concerns fell by the wayside however amid heightened fears of Islamist attacks and comes amidst a hardening of stances globally as governments recalibrate the balance of personal freedom in an age of global terror attacks.
Fears have been given added weight by the election of Donald Trump who as US president will have access to all the information gathered by UK agencies.
The Liberal Democrat peer Lord Strasburger, one of the leading voices against the investigatory powers act, 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 new act formalises a number of powers that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ have been employing for years without any legal basis following a court ruling that they had unlawfully amassed confidential personal data. It also enables security services to hack computers and mobile phones of individuals and access stored personal data, even if the person concerned is not suspected of any wrongdoing.
UK security services have long been accused of hacking security software to track users.