SurveillanceBritain’s mass surveillance regime is directly opposing human rights
In light of the Facebook data scandal more people are beginning to challenge the web’s pervasive surveillance culture. But few British citizens seem to be aware of the government’s own online surveillance regime – significant parts of which have been deemed unlawful.
In light of the Facebook data scandal more people are beginning to challenge the web’s pervasive surveillance culture. But few British citizens seem to be aware of the government’s own online surveillance regime – significant parts of which have been deemed unlawful.
The UK government broke EU law under the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA), the Court of Appeal ruled in January.
The regime – colloquially known as the Snoopers’ Charter – had allowed public bodies to have access to the records of British citizens’ web activity and phone records, without any suspicion that a serious crime had been committed. This activity took place without any independent oversight.
DRIPA was rushed through parliament in 2014 by the then Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government after the European Court of Justice (CJEU) ruled that the EU-wide Data Retention Directive (DRD) was “invalid”, due to the disproportionate levels of mass online surveillance it had allowed countries within the bloc to exploit.
The DRD had required communications service providers to retain subscriber data of their customer base for two years. But the CJEU declared that it seriously interfered with fundamental rights to privacy and data protection in a way that wasn’t strictly necessary.
The UK government had justified the swift enactment of DRIPA to patch up what it said was a capability gap, after the DRD was ripped up by the EU, to allow Britain to continue to fight terrorism and other serious crime.
DRIPA allowed secretaries of state to compel telephone companies, internet service providers and web-based services to continue to retain communications data, which concerns the “where, when, with whom and how”.
It works like this, according to the Home Office:
· A person sends an email or text message to someone, the “with whom”;
· It reveals “where”, in other words the sender’s location;
· A time stamp is also provided for “when” the message was sent;
· The communications data also reveals “how” the message was sent, by revealing which messaging service was used;
· It doesn’t reveal the content of a message.
