‘Desire of Codes’ installation, Seiko Mikami. Flickr/Ars Electronica (Ryuichi Maruo, YCAM). Some rights reserved.Next week, the UK government will publish its new Investigatory Powers Bill, the successor to the Snooper’s Charter (officially the Communications Data Bill) killed off by Liberal Democrats in the last parliament. This legislation is expected to be very wide-ranging, covering powers for the police and security services to listen in to phone calls, read emails, interfere with our computers, and for them and a huge range of other organisations to find out who we ring, text or email, where we are when we do it, and every website we ever go to.
It’s an important piece of legislation, with potentially huge impacts on our lives, in particular on the levels of privacy and security we can expect to have. However, since it will inevitably be somewhat technical, there is a real risk the debate will focus on grossly oversimplified claims and the invoking of terrorists, paedophiles and the like. From personal experience, the quality of real analysis of these issues in parliament is not anything like as high as is needed, with a great tendency for parliamentarians simply to give way to the demands made, however thin the evidence for them.
Fortunately, when we demanded a sunset clause in DRIPA, the emergency legislation that dealt somewhat with these issues in 2014, we also secured a commitment that the replacement legislation would be presented as a draft, to be scrutinised in detail by a special committee of MPs and peers over a number of months, before being published and debated as normal. This gives a real chance to improve the legislation.
