Today’s Times front page is dominated by the news that nine cyber-security experts and academics have issued a stark warning to David Cameron to halt ‘sweeping plans to hand the security services the power to snoop on emails, website visits and social media sites’: “they remain as naive and technically dangerous as when they were floated by the last government,” they warn.
The paper notes the opposition both of Nick Clegg — who highlighted his disagreement with the draft Bill last December — and of Lib Dem MP Julian Huppert, who points out: “Where we lead, other countries would follow, snooping on their citizens’ legal activities. … The case for these proposals is massively out-weighed by the cost and the harm to privacy, here and overseas.”
The cyber-experts (who include Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University, Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute, and Angela Sasse, Professor of Human-Centred Technology at UCL) argue the Bill should be torn up: ‘We … urge the Government to abandon the Communications Data Bill and to work with the technical community and the police to meet the real challenges of law enforcement in a connected world.”
* Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall.
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4 Comments
Good stuff. I suspect that Theresa May (who seems to have forgotten ALL of her Manifesto commitments to civil liberties) will try to make this a battle of wills against Clegg. Clegg needs to hold firm on this.
Would be too easy for the opportunity of entrapment or for it to be called, let alone standard human privacy violations of both the target and any associates of theirs, presumed or who are innocent
“The paper notes the opposition both of Nick Clegg — who highlighted his disagreement with the draft Bill last December …”
Except that – as with secret courts, the NHS ‘reforms’ and so many other policies – this would never have been adopted as government policy if Nick Clegg hadn’t agreed to it in the first place.
How he gets away with portraying himself as an opponent of such measures – when in fact he is to blame for enabling them – is beyond me.
I look forward to Nick’s excuses when he does a roll over on this issue and votes with the Tories on this bill.