The Plans Were On Display

At the end of November 2016 the UK government passed a law which has been nicknamed "The Snooper's Charter" - which should be s' but there we go - it grants over 50 agencies including the Police, Health Service, and Department for Work and Pensions, the right to access peoples' internet history without a warrant.  There's a very interesting post here which you can read which details the list of agencies that can have access to your data.

There are two arguments people tend to give in response to this law in support of it, they are "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about" and "freedom must be sacrificed for security" - both of these arguments I take issue with.  The former implies that it is acceptable to have every single part of your life recorded and accessed by the government.  It also implies that the concept of intimacy does not exist, that all privacy is intended to conceal - if this were the case all clothing would be see-through, if there is no element to intimacy and the only reason it is needed is to shield you from the elements, not to conceal your body then you should have no issue wearing see-through clothes.  If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about.

The second argument is also flawed, you could argue that if you were to build several mega-prisons around the country and put every single person in the entire country into them you would prevent all terrorist attacks, prevent most crimes, and create jobs for every inmate to carry out, assigning work to people rather than them looking for it.  The problem with this extreme is that although it works to remove the impetus and the means of committing crimes for the vast majority of crimes - some would still persist as prisons aren't exactly holiday camps - this comes at the sacrifice of liberty.  You would be punishing the majority of the population to prevent the minority from engaging in behaviours that the majority don't agree with.

When it comes to the Snooper's Charter the same principle applies.  The view is taken that the sacrifice is necessary and that the vast majority of law-abiding citizens are an acceptable casualty to prevent a minority from engaging in those behaviours - although that is debatable as to whether surveillance actually prevents these behaviours but I digress. 

There are of course ways around this, most notably the use of a VPN - Virtual Private Network - which for a fee you can access which allows you to browse the internet with privacy - provided the VPN is based outside the UK.  To your ISP they see all traffic going back and forth between the VPN and nowhere else.  If you don't want to pay for this service, you can also download Opera Developer right now, which includes a built in optional VPN - or you can wait until the feature is fully integrated into the main release and then use that instead.

There is an argument against these services, that they facilitate their misuse by providing an effective way to engage in misbehaviour.  To those that use this defence I see that as hypocrisy.  Yes a minority of people will misuse the service, I don't approve of that and neither do the majority that use them, it is regrettable, but it is tolerable for the exact same reason the government thinks it is tolerable to accept indiscriminate infringement of civil liberties, namely, if the government thinks it is acceptable to sacrifice the majority to pursue a minority, then it is perfectly acceptable to sacrifice a minority to protect the majority. 

The bottom line here is if you did not want people to respond in this way, defending themselves, then you shouldn't attack them in the first place.  If you are waging war on a small minority of terrorists in a country, you will only inflame that ideology by attacking the civilians too who have nothing to do with them.  If civilians in Syria had the ability to stop missiles being fired and bombs dropped on their cities they would use that ability, even if it meant protecting those people that they do not want to protect, because those people have better defences than they do, and the only people getting hurt are the civilians.

With the Snooper's Charter the same is true.  Far beyond VPNs there are other measures like Tor which can be used to further anonymise and protect the user.  People who are engaging in widespread organised crime online have the technology to shield themselves from the powers of this bill and have been using it for a long time.  This bill will not work to catch those people and that fact demonstrates the fundamental misunderstanding and lack of knowledge that ministers have that led us to this point.  Make no mistake this bill gives the government no effective power or advantages to pursuing criminals, and gives the government the most power to infringe on civil liberties and encroach on your private life.

For example, the Department of Health could use the information to determine how long you spend online each day and make assumptions about your level of physical activity.  Or perhaps the department for Work and Pensions could use the information to determine how many job sites people claiming benefits access per day/week and sanction claimants if they are not deemed to be "looking hard enough"; the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland can do the same.  You could go so far as to say HM Revenue and Customs can use the information to build a profile of online activity and determine whether you are engaging in any activity that could be remunerated and use this information to identify any possible economic activity you have not declared to the tax office.

These would all be perfectly legal as a result of this bill, you can decide whether you think it will actually lead to it being used in this way, but understand the lack of safeguards and the fact they can do this without warrant means this is all possible.  This bill was passed with deliberate ambiguity and lack of specific safeguards to allow it to be interpreted widely, and like the activity of GCHQ in recent years it will be something you will find very hard to prove. 

People will look back on this law in decades to come and they will see that this was the foundation upon which widespread mass surveillance was granted legitimacy, and rather like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the argument by the Government will simply be "The plans were on display and nobody objected"