YESTERDAY the Tory home secretary, Theresa May, unveiled in parliament her latest ‘revised’ snooper’s charter that she intends to rush into law by the end of the year.
The initial Investigatory Powers Bill was first published last year to a chorus of outrage from civil liberties groups and even the libertarian wing of the Tory party, who denounced it as legalised snooping and a gross infringement on the rights to privacy.
May has since claimed that she has taken into account these criticisms and is presenting a revised bill that purports to give some judicial oversight into the whole process of the state bugging and collecting information on every telephone call, e-mail, and the unfettered access to the records of every website visited by the entire population.
In reality the only ‘safeguard’ is that the security services and the police will have to get a judge’s permission before accessing communications data – something that should not prove too difficult to do.
According to May, the new bill would put beyond doubt that internet and mobile phone companies will only be forced to remove encryption, which protects devices from being opened up by the state, which the companies themselves have applied and only where it is ‘practicable’ for them to do so.
This relates to a legal storm raging in America where the Apple company has been taken to court by the FBI in an attempt to force Apple to install a ‘backdoor’ in future generations of the iPhone that allows them to bypass any security devices used to protect information stored on the device.
Apple are resisting through the courts claiming it is standing up for ‘our customers’ privacy and personal safety’. However this stand is, according to many, little more than grandstanding, a response to the revelations by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden that the security services in the US and in the UK were hoovering up every telephone call, e-mail, text message and video communication on the entire planet, apparently with the complicity of the internet companies.
May’s bill is nothing more than an attempt to put this illegal mass surveillance on a legal footing – to put into law the right of the state to monitor and hack into every phone, tablet and computer in the country. It will legalise the use of already existing facilities on these devices that enable them to be hacked and taken over.
It was recently brought to light that the programme used to remotely update any device connected to the internet can be taken over to switch them on, record both visually and audibly what was going on in the vicinity without the owner’s knowledge.
All this will now be placed on a legal footing if May gets her way. It won’t just be GCHQ legally monitoring your every move. The new bill claims that it prevents UK spies from asking foreign intelligence bodies to carry out surveillance on their behalf but with the get out clause that it is OK as long as they have the permission of the secretary of state and judicial commissioner.
The big lie at the heart of this bill is that mass surveillance of every person in the globe is vital as part of the ‘war against terrorism’. In fact experts have pointed out the sheer volume of collecting billions of calls and messages by the spies makes it impossible to sort out the individual terrorist.
All the spying and mass surveillance has only one objective – to be used in the real war being waged by international capitalism against the working class at home. May’s bill will legalise the already existing use of the state apparatus to target the enemy at home, the working class and youth who will not sit back and passively accept permanent austerity and a life of never-ending poverty as the price for bailing-out a bankrupt capitalist system.
The only way to deal with the capitalist state apparatus of spies and mass surveillance is to smash it to bits with the socialist revolution.
