A quick look at the UK’s new state surveillance laws and what they could mean

The law gives the Conversative-led government unprecedented power.

When Theresa May announced how the Investigative Powers Bill would work, many said “Why worry? I’ve got nothing to hide,” but that’s not how it works. If you’ve got nothing to hide, what would you do if the government said they’re putting cameras into every room in your house?

The Investigative Powers Bill — a.k.a the Snoopers’ Charter — gives the UK government unprecedented power to see into our personal and private lives, to snoop on us and collect all that data. It’s not like this is a particularly new thing: we’ve known GCHQ has been doing most of this since Edward Snowden leaked over 9,000 documents relating to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) snooping on citizens of the United States, but also how GCHQ and the ‘Five Eyes’ (US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) would also snoop on their citizens, using these secretive agencies to do it. This was all against the law, at least in the UK, so the government made it legal.

The data GCHQ is collecting is intense and far-reaching. Every phone call, text, or email is tracked and logged, along with one year of our private internet browsing history being collected by our internet service provider. the server space for this massive data collection and retrieval is being paid for by the government. In addition to this, the NSA’s PRISM program enables data collected by many big technology corporations, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, or Yahoo, can be on request sent back to the NSAor GCHQ for further analysis.

By and large, this won’t affect many people, hence the “If you’ve got nothing to hide” attitude by many citizens. However, what if the government starts to build a profile of you using this data? Using artificial intelligence, GCHQ could start to build a profile of each individual citizen, carefully adding more and more data, making the profile more comprehensive. It might be able to find out your political allegiances, or if you were going to cause any kind of trouble, and then pre-empt that. Now, many say that if this can stop terrorist attacks, this is a good thing; less will die and therefore the world will be a safer and more secure place. Or will it?

In an interview with former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Edward Snowden rebutted a claim by David Anderson, the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, who said that there is no alternative to the bulk collection of data, and this has stopped many terrorism atrocities worldwide. In response, Snowden said that in the US, two independent commissions found that, at least in the telephonic context, surveillance and ‘bulk collection’ of data has not stopped a single terrorist attack. Granted Snowden is using the United States findings and Anderson uses the UK’s, but even so, it is an interesting point.

Snowden also brings up a point of how Anderson has essentially redefined mass surveillance. Instead of calling it that, which is largely seen as negative in the public consciousness, Anderson calls it ‘bulk collection’. Once these terms get redefined, that is when we must start to worry, Snowden says, because often, and specifically in this case, the new term is not defined. This means there is no transparency.

In a similar way to the UK’s new Bill, days before Barack Obama left office, he greatly expanded the United States’ state surveillance operations. In simple terms, the new powers enable the NSA to share the global data it gathers with the government’s other intelligence agencies in the US. This definitely bad news, as it subjects United States citizens to more unwarranted surveillance, but it also has an upside: it stops Donald Trump from further degrading civil liberties while he is in office, due to how the new rules have been put in place.

In the future, I’ll be doing a lot more writing on state surveillance, both in the United Kingdom’s context and in the United States’s, and other countries as well. Stay tuned for more.

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