The IPB was the flagship policy of Prime Minister Theresa May, who put it forward when she was Home Secretary under the previous prime minister, David Cameron. With the expiry, due to a “sunset clause”, of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) in December of this year, the even-more-authoritarian IPB was advanced as its necessary replacement.
With the IPB, May brought together the current diverse rules governing state surveillance into a single piece of legislation. The new laws are an unprecedented attack on the rights and privacy of every UK citizen. It gives the security services the power to gather information on millions, and to process, profile and store the results. This will be achieved by compelling Internet Service Providers to keep Internet connection records for a period of 12 months for access by the police and state security services.
The state is now legally able to monitor every Web site a person has visited, every comment made and every search term used. Companies will be forced by the spying agencies to hack into their customers’ devices and override their security. The electronic devices of millions of people will be hacked in bulk,
with the agreement of the home secretary as the only prerequisite.
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The vast state spying operation that was carried out illegally for years—before being revealed by US whistleblower Edward Snowden—is now being legalised.
After the IPB was passed, Snowden tweeted, “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies”.
Describing the chilling implications of the IPB, Independent columnist Mike Harris wrote,
“The bill will allow the Government to hand UK tech firms top-secret notices to hack their customers; the police will be able to look at your internet browsing history, and your personal data will be tied together so the state can find out if you’ve attended a protest, who your friends are, and where you live. The most authoritarian piece of spying legislation any democratic government has ever proposed has sped through Parliament with only a whimper of opposition”.
Newsweek headlined its article on the new laws, “IP Bill Is Most Extreme Surveillance Law Ever Passed in a Democracy”. The article, written by Jim Killock—the director of civil liberties organisation, the Open Rights Group—described the IPB as an “extraordinary document”, which
“grants the state the ability to harvest information in bulk and to process and profile it without suspicion”. What was under way was the “sheer revocation of democracy”, warns Killock.
In the Guardian, Killock said, “The UK now has a surveillance law that is more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy”.