Powers Bill: AKA Mass Surveillance 3.0
By Graham Vanbergen
If the government has anything to do with it, privacy just got a whole lot worse. What the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill holds for everyone is exactly what all the criticism was about in the first place – except it attempts to make it lawful.
The Bill proposes that instead of deceiving every citizen in the UK
it will now simply admit to carrying out mass collection of our data and
still hack into and bug our personal devices such as computers and
smart phones. It’s the Snoopers Charter but as previous attempts were
rejected, the Home Secretary is having another stab at it. Same thing,
different words.
We already knew that the security services were doing this but
instead of storing all this information, they now propose that Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) capture, or steal – depending on your view –
every single online movement you make and hand it over to whoever,
whenever. Specifically, the security services, the police and “other
public bodies”.
