SAN FRANCISCO — The Snowden Effect continues with a new law in the United Kingdom requiring all web and phone companies in the United Kingdom to store users’ web browsing histories for 12 months and give police, security services and government agencies access to the data.
The Investigatory Powers Act also gives security services new powers to access phones and computers and to collect communications data in bulk.
“This law was basically the result of three inquiries that took place after the Snowden revelations,” said Pam Cowburn, communications director with the London-based digital privacy organization the Open Rights Group.
Edward Snowden was the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of classified information about a mass NSA phone spying program in 2013. The reverberations of those revelations have been echoing across the globe ever since.
The law, signed by Queen Elizabeth II Tuesday, is being called “the Snoopers’ Charter” in the British press.
It requires that not only Internet service providers but also Wi-Fi hotspot providers keep a record of all top level websites visited by people in the nation. For example, if a user went to usatoday.com, information that when the site was visited and by whom would be kept, but not any specific pages on the site they had looked at.
“The, with a warrant, the police and 48 government organization can access these records. This is the part of the law that is unprecedented. This happens in Russia, but in no other democracy,” said Cowburn.
In addition, the government will be allowed to create filters to sift through the data collected, allowing it to find potential patterns or individuals to further investigate, she said.
The government says the new law codifies what it had already been doing while offering rigorous oversight.
“The Investigatory Powers Act is world-leading legislation, that provides unprecedented transparency and substantial privacy protection,” Home Secretary Amber Rudd said in a statement.
Privacy rights groups say the new law makes the United Kingdom a front-runner in the realm of draconian surveillance policy internationally.
A petition to repeal the law had garnered 138,000 signatures by Tuesday and at least two lawsuits had been brought to amend it.
source:http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/29/uk-britain-england-investigatory-powers-act-surveillance-law-police-security-services/94611138/
