{"id":83538,"date":"2016-11-28T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2016-11-28T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=83538"},"modified":"2016-11-26T15:52:11","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T15:52:11","slug":"uk-passes-bill-providing-most-extreme-spying-powers-in-the-developed-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/11\/uk-passes-bill-providing-most-extreme-spying-powers-in-the-developed-world\/","title":{"rendered":"UK Passes Bill Providing Most Extreme Spying Powers in the Developed World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"uk-spying-surveillance-big-brother\"<\/a><\/p>\n

24 Nov 2016 – <\/em>The House of Lords, the upper house of the U.K.\u2019s parliament, just passed<\/a> the Investigatory Powers Bill, legislation that provides immense spying powers to the British government. The government\u2019s new surveillance privileges are virtually unrivaled across the globe.<\/p>\n

The bill,\u00a0which critics have deemed the \u201cSnooper\u2019s Charter,\u201d will force internet companies to keep records on their users for up to a year. These records will be accessed by numerous government departments, and the law also allows the government to force companies to hack into products they have sold so consumers can be monitored. Under the newly passed legislation, the government can also ask these companies to make their devices less secure so communications can be intercepted. They can also mandate that companies encrypt their devices on demand.<\/p>\n

As noted<\/a> by the Independent<\/em>:<\/p>\n

In all, the new bill includes a range of changes to the law that will affect normal people<\/a>, and gives Britain perhaps the most extreme spying powers in the developed world.<\/strong> (emphasis added)<\/p>\n

Supposedly\u00a0Apple<\/a> and Twitter have fought against this, though it\u2019s difficult<\/a> to take their sentiments seriously<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even in the face of mounting criticism from these major technology and internet companies \u2014 and from\u00a0senior parliamentary committees<\/a> and\u00a0representatives from the United Nations<\/a> \u2014 the legislation was barely challenged in Parliament.<\/p>\n

Like a bad dream that only gets worse, the only\u00a0amendment<\/a> to the bill so far has been from MPs (members of Parliament), and its purpose was to ensure that MPs could not be spied on under the new legislation.<\/p>\n

Considering the bill was designed to\u00a0target companies such as Whatsapp<\/a>, which is owned by Facebook and has\u00a0over one billion users<\/a>, the law is tantamount to widespread bulk surveillance. Such a widespread invasion of privacy is a gross violation of basic\u00a0human rights<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have nothing to hide therefore I have nothing to fear\u201d is a common rationalization to downplay these impositions, but it is also the most poorly crafted and cowardly justification for surveillance in the ongoing debate. Whistleblower Edward Snowden debunked this mentality when he lamented that the origins of this approach stem from Nazism. Snowden famously\u00a0stated<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause privacy isn\u2019t about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect. That\u2019s who you are. Privacy is baked into our language, our core concepts of government and self in every way. It\u2019s why we call it \u2018private property.\u2019 Without privacy you don\u2019t have anything for yourself.<\/p>\n

\u201cArguing that you don\u2019t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like arguing that you don\u2019t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

The people who threaten to take our human rights \u2014 or even advocate doing so \u2014 are never victims of such oppression and can usually escape these limitations quite easily. As stated by Glenn Greenwald in his TEDtalk<\/a>, \u201cWhy Privacy Matters\u201d:<\/p>\n

This same division can be seen with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who in an infamous interview in 2010 pronounced that privacy is no longer a \u2018social norm.\u2019 Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife purchased not only their own house but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto for a total of 30 million dollars in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy that prevented other people from monitoring what they do in their personal lives.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The House of Lords\u2019 passage of the text now means it awaits the Royal Assent, the approval and signature of the Queen before it becomes law in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish it under a Creative Commons<\/a> license with attribution to theAntiMedia.org<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 activistpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 Nov 2016 – The House of Lords just passed the Investigatory Powers Bill, which provides immense spying powers to the British government. The only amendment to the bill has been to ensure that MPs could not be spied on under the new legislation. \u201cArguing that you don\u2019t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like arguing that you don\u2019t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}