Britain aims to track Web users
A bill to keep records of site visits and app use draws criticism.
LONDON — Records of every website visited by every person in Britain over the previous 12 months would be kept and made accessible to law enforcement agencies under a new bill introduced in Parliament that would expand authorities’ reach in cyberspace to fight serious crime, including terrorism.
The legislation, unveiled Wednesday, also aims to codify the bulk collection of communications data that Britain’s spy agencies have been practicing without an explicit parliamentary mandate. Some of these methods of vacuuming up socalled metadata were exposed in documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.
The bill would enshrine in law the security agencies’ right to hack into and bug computers and phones. But intercepting a person’s emails and text messages would need the approval of a senior government minister and a senior judge, a “double-lock” system designed to keep major breaches of privacy to a minimum, Home Secretary Theresa May said.
The proposals form the government’s long-promised attempt to overhaul surveillance and intelligence-gathering laws widely acknowledged to be out of date. Some were put in place well before the Internet became a central facet of contemporary life.
“We need to update the law so that our law enforcement and security agencies have the powers they need to continue to keep us safe,” May told the House of Commons.
But civil liberties groups described the proposals as taking further bites out of personal privacy in Britain, whose residents are already among the most-monitored people in the world. Security cameras are ubiquitous in outdoor spaces and in many buildings.
Particularly troubling to critics is the provision compelling telecom companies to track and store information on which websites their customers visit and which social media apps, such as the popular messaging service WhatsApp, they use. The data, to be kept for a year, would not include the content of any messages or the individual pages looked at beyond a site’s home page.
May called it “simply the modern equivalent of an itemized phone bill.” But critics sharply disagreed, noting that even U.S. intelligence agencies aren’t known to collect such information.
“This long-awaited bill constitutes a breathtaking attack on the Internet security of every man, woman and child in our country,” Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said in a statement. She called on lawmakers to amend the bill to “strike a better balance between privacy and surveillance.”
The legislation is expected to be formally debated by the full Parliament in spring.