UK's new surveillance law creates a national browser history with a search engine to match

The Snoopers Charter, an extreme surveillance bill that passed last week, and it's the most extensive domestic spying regime that any "democratic" country has passed, and is a potential blueprint for Orwellian surveillance elsewhere in the years to come.

The Snoopers Charter requires ISPs to retain a log of all the websites you visit for up to a year, as well as a list of the apps you use, and lets the police search this data without a warrant and without any record-keeping (of the sort that would show, for example, that the police are abusing their powers by using them for personal gain, petty vengeance, or racial profiling).

Additionally, the bill allows the police and the country's spies to go hack computers in the UK and abroad, as well as requiring companies to install ambiguously defined back doors to get around crypto.

James Vincent's explainer at The Verge is a good primer on these intrusive surveillance powers.

There’s also the worry that the targeted hacking laws could be used to hack multiple people under the use of something called a "thematic warrant." Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at Cambridge University who gave testimony about the IP bill to the government, gives the example of the police chief of a UK city wanting to stem knife crime, and asking the government to force Google to get data from Android smartphones. "The point is that it’s possible," Anderson tells The Verge. "Perhaps the government has given some private assurances to these companies [that it won’t happen], but we know from long experience that such private assurances are not worth the paper they’re not written on."


[James Vincent/The Verge]

(Image: Shepard Fairey/1984)