One of the biggest criticisms of Theresa May’s tenure as Home Secretary was her infamous Snooper’s Charter bill. It requires ISPs to hold a year’s worth of your browsing history, to be handed over to one of several government agencies on request.
It is the most draconian legislation of its kind on the planet. It’s now law.
The UK’s new Investigatory Powers Bill will make law a sweeping set of powers that enables the British government to collect unparalleled amounts of data on its people.
Passed this week by British Parliament, the top-level history of any web browser in Britain will now be stored for up to a year, accessible by government departments, while the government will gain the power to force private companies to relinquish their encryption secrets, allowing agencies to access data from secured products. It also legitimizes bulk data collection for security services.
“The passing of the IP Bill will have an impact that goes beyond the UK’s shores,” says Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group. “It is likely that other countries, including authoritarian regimes with poor human rights records, will use this law to justify their own intrusive surveillance powers.”
The immediate commentariat focus is on Theresa May getting to see what scurf you’re watching. That’s dangerous enough. It has the potential to be a nationwide version of Ted Heath’s dirt book:-
"Quiet, dissenter! Or we’ll tell people about your Toblerone fetish"
The other implications are pretty terrifying, especially when one considers some of the cumulative legislation over the years. Detention without trial. That fucking enabling act. The “Tyranny Toolkit” is complete and ready to go for anyone that needs it.
This is up there with stop and search under anti-terror, the small print that gives the police the freedom to detain anyone at any time, for no reason at all.
I am slightly uncomfortable that civil liberties are being eroded and few people have noticed.
One of my old dear’s mates was around the other day. When he asked my bro to fix his tablet, there were loads of Shagbook notifications. He was pretty crimson about it at the time.
Knowing it’s a button, I explained some of the new legislation to him.
“You’ll be alright with your common or garden filth, but you won’t be able to watch hamster porn anymore. Duct-tape or bareback”
It does rather beg the question what consitutes a ‘non-conventional sex act’.
I think we can probably be in agreement that Bearsy and Fatso are going to be caught out.
Bearsy’s dream job with BBFC? Sitting for hours watching porn to see if it can be censored or not?
The scale of the restrictions only became apparent after the BBFC, which has since 1984 been empowered to classify videos for commercial hire or sale, agreed to become the online age verification regulator last month. A spokeswoman for the BBFC said it would also check whether sites host “pornographic content that we would refuse to classify”.
“In making this assessment, we will apply the standards that we apply to pornography that is distributed offline,” she said. “If a website fails on either of these [age verification or obscene content] tests then a notification of non-compliance will be sent to the site.”
