Flickr/Ben Raynal. Some rights reserved.On 29 November 2016, Her Majesty gave the royal assent to the most encompassing surveillance powers the United Kingdom has ever seen. The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA) – or ‘Snoopers’ Charter’ – will pass into law before the year is up, three and a half years since Edward Snowden began making revelations about the extent of extra-legal mass surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ under the secretive Five Eyes intelligence alliance. The act of curtailing what might once have been thought basic political freedoms – to anonymously read what you want in your living room, say – has passed by with astonishingly little public debate. Why has the threat of these Investigatory Powers failed to galvanise both the parliamentary and the popular imagination, and what should we be doing now?
“If our current arrangements, about liberal democracy, and the rule of law, and restraint on official power – if all those assumptions turn out to be wrong, then we have created an infrastructure for really serious social and political control," cautioned professor John Naughton, speaking to openDemocracy at an event in Cambridge which assessed the act’s implications. Until Brexit and Trump, these arrangements seemed more invulnerable than they do today. Back then, Naughton says, those in government told him “‘oh my dear boy, this is a liberal democracy. These things don’t happen’…Well, the day after Brexit, we lost our government – the whole bloody lot – and for three or four days, it looked as though we would have a lunatic in charge. And in the case of the United States, it really happened.”
The UK government is now legally authorised to do much of what it has been doing anyway for 17 years, since the IP Act incorporates on a clean sheet of legislation the most sweeping surveillance powers ever seen, not just in the UK, but in any western European nation or in the United States. Many regard the codification itself as good news – the powers of the secret state are above board for the first time in 500 years, and some oversight mechanisms are in place.
