Theresa May-Donald Trump piece by street artist Bambi. Yui Mok/PA Wire/PA Images. All rights reserved.Last autumn, when the UK’s menacing Investigatory Powers Act was on the verge of being adopted, the human rights community grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of public interest in what would later be dubbed “the most extreme surveillance law in UK history”. Reporters Without Borders – known internationally as Reporters sans frontières (RSF) – was among the groups working frantically to stop passage of the bill (the ‘Snoopers’ Charter’), in the absence of sufficient safeguards for whistleblowers, journalists, and their sources.
RSF cautioned that the bill could serve as a “death sentence” for investigative journalism in the UK. And yet it passed, with Labour whipping its MPs and peers to abstain rather than oppose the bill, and hijacking the final few debates with a piggybacking amendment on press regulation that had no business being tacked onto the bill in the first place, yet effectively diverted focus from the serious surveillance matters at stake.
At the time, one journalist exclaimed: “You are living in a Black Mirror episode and you don’t care”. Now, three months later, with stories breaking around the Law Commission’s alarming proposals under the auspices of a new ‘Espionage Act’ that could land journalists in jail for up to 14 years for obtaining leaked information, the dystopian world of Black Mirror once again seems uncomfortably close to our present reality in the UK.
