The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Snoopers Charter Nick Clegg David Cameron

Nick Clegg condemns revival of mass data ‘scooping’ snoopers charter

Author

By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

January 13, 2015 | 2 min read

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats will stand against the Conservative Party’s newly revived ‘snoopers charter’ legally requiring comms firms to store records of consumers' digital movements for as long as 12 months.

Speaking from Paris following the Charlie Hebdo attack, Prime Minister David Cameron hinted at the addition of the Communication Data Bill to the Conservative Party’s 2015 general election mandate in a bid to afford greater data access to intelligence agencies.

If passed, the bill would see collected and stored, records of every UK citizen's communications made through social media, emails, gaming platforms and smartphones, could be accessed by intelligence agencies via warrant.

Clegg told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: “Privacy is a qualified right. If someone wants to do us harm, we should be able to break their privacy and go after their communications but the snoopers' charter was not about intercepting communications.

“It was about storing a record of all your social media activity, of every website you have visited of every single individual in this country, of people who would never dream of doing anyone else any harm, would never dream of becoming a terrorist or having anything to do with extremist ideologies.

"The question we need to ask ourselves, in a free, open society as we defend our values against the abhorrent attacks we saw in Paris, is where do you draw the line?"

In 2013, Clegg scuppered the original ‘snoopers charter' as the law would have resulted in a “significant reduction in personal privacy".

Snoopers Charter Nick Clegg David Cameron

More from Snoopers Charter

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +