This article titled “New law to tell internet service providers to retain browsing data” was written by Owen Bowcott, Aisha Gani and Alex Hern, for The Guardian on Friday 30th October 2015 19.26 UTCWhat are the key differences between trustees and executors?
Powers to view the web browsing history of criminal suspects or missing people are likely to feature in the government’s surveillance legislation published next week.
The investigatory powers bill is expected to reintroduce a requirement that telecommunication firms retain records of sites accessed by their users, known as weblogs, for a 12-month period – a key element of the “snooper’s charter” that was blocked by Liberal Democrats in the last parliament.
Lobbying by senior police officers from the National Police Chiefs’ Council for mandatory retention of internet connection records comes ahead of the draft bill being published.
In a statement released on Friday, the organisation which represents senior police officers said police forces did not need access to everyone’s entire web history but added: “We do want to be effective in the digital world so that there aren’t no-go areas online where we can’t trace criminal activity or find crucial information to protect people at risk of harm. We want to do this with strong, clear privacy safeguards.”
Police said they need the powers because the scale of online activity meant traditional methods of surveillance and investigation were becoming less effective.
Civil liberty groups and privacy campaigners, however, have responded with alarm at the prospect of a key feature of the snooper’s charter being reintroduced.
Rachel Robinson, policy officer for Liberty, said: “It defies belief that the government continues to seek powers so extraordinarily intrusive that none of our major intelligence allies think them acceptable to use on their people.
“These measures have already been rejected by a cross-party parliamentary committee and the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation [David Anderson QC]. We will resist them in the strongest terms and urge right-thinking parliamentarians to do the same.”
Anderson has not been enthusiastic about such an enhancement of search powers. No other EU or Commonwealth country requires the blanket retention of weblogs, he has pointed out; the practice was recently prohibited by law in Australia.
Anderson has commented that “a detailed operational case” needs to be made out for retaining weblogs along with “a rigorous assessment” of the “lawfulness, likely effectiveness, intrusiveness and cost” involved.
Weblogs record which web addresses users have visited, though they do not keep track of what was viewed on any particular site.
The address of a website often contains far more detail than simply the name of the company being visited. A record of browsing history would necessarily contain all internet searches made using websites including Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, since the address for the search results page contains the search terms within it.
Any requirement that firms retain browsing histories for a year is likely to be presented with Home Office assurances that it will be carefully controlled by additional safeguards preventing mass surveillance.
GCHQ, the government’s monitoring agency, and the intelligence services say they carry out bulk interception of online data only in order to investigate or read communications that are the subject of search warrants.
Internet service providers have warned that any new powers introduced by the government to allow broader surveillance of web browsing behaviour must come with adequate oversight to protect civil liberties.
The Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) said it had sent a checklist of principles to MPs that it believes any new legislation must adhere to.
The section on transparency and oversight reads: “We encourage parliamentarians to be wary of arguments that the investigatory powers bill will merely update existing powers and fill a gap in data availability.
“The nature of surveillance, investigatory powers and technology have changed as communications have evolved from phone and post to online communication, leading to even existing powers becoming more intrusive over time.”
Andrew Kernahan, ISPA spokesman, said: “Once the bill is published we will be going through it with a fine-toothed comb.
“What we do know is that internet connection records that the government wanted was included in the draft communications data bill that was rejected by parliament.”
In September Andrew Parker, director-general of MI5, took the unprecedented step of giving a live broadcast interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, in which he called for “the cooperation of the companies who run and provide services over the internet” to help tackle the use of encrypted communications by terrorists.
Parker said: “MI5 and others need to be able to navigate the internet to find terrorist communication. We need to be able to use datasets to be able to join the dots to be able to find and stop the terrorists who mean us harm before they are able to bring plots to fruition.
“We have been pretty successful at that in recent years but it is becoming more difficult to do it as technology changes faster and faster [and] encryption comes in.”
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