In the shadow of Donald Trump鈥檚 election victory in the US, politicians in Brexit Britain have quietly passed the most pervasive and invasive mass surveillance legislation in history.
The is 304 pages of complex permissions for the UK intelligence and security services, police and other public bodies to engage in bulk interception, acquisition and retention of the entire population鈥檚 communications data and all other communications crossing the UK. It also grants access to bulk personal datasets, including those held by individuals, communities, groups, public services and civil society bodies. And it permits bulk equipment interference (aka hacking).
The depth and reach of the legislation is quite staggering. That it has been slipped through in the wake of Trump鈥檚 election really should not escape notice.
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We hear much about the between the UK and the US. This extends to the secret services of the two nations.
GCHQ, the UK intelligence gathering hub, has now been provided with the legislative surveillance architecture of a police state. Mass surveillance on an unimaginable scale is about to become legal in the UK 鈥� pending the mere technicality of Royal Assent.
Special relationship
Given the close cooperation of GCHQ with the US National Security Agency under the post second world war arrangement, who promised, while on the campaign trail, to reignite, expand and intensify US engagement in torture.
Even lifelong, genuinely committed intelligence and security agents and , who have supported the expansion of similar laws on the other side of the Atlantic for years, are .
Can any of the British MPs, who were conspicuous by their continual absence from parliamentary debates about the Investigatory Powers Bill but, like well-trained puppies, showed up to vote it through its multiple stages in accordance with party instructions, seriously suggest they would be happy to have these powers in the hands of a dangerous or reckless US president?
We can only hope that Trump and his team, also poised to inherit at home, might not prove to be as bad in government as they sounded on the election trail. Still we should be extremely wary of smoothly handing them access to the output of the well-oiled, indiscriminate tools and unrestrained tentacles of an all-seeing, all-hearing, ubiquitously observing police state in the UK.
As and many civil liberties advocates have said for generations, we need to be very careful about building all-powerful mass surveillance tools because you never know who is going to get the keys.
The decline of privacy rights began under US president George W Bush, UK prime minister Tony Blair and their successors because we were told to be scared of terrorists and criminals empowered by the internet and mobile communications. We have now given the power to destroy those privacy rights to a Trump administration, by proxy, through the US intelligence agencies鈥� close relationship with their counterparts in the UK.
Ray Corrigan is a senior lecturer in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics faculty at the Open University. The views here are his own and not those of his employer
