David Cameron has appealed to the British public to back sweeping new electronic surveillance powers for police and intelligence services, despite misgivings among civil liberties groups, legal experts and even within the Conservative Party.
The prime minister said the new surveillance powers contained in the Investigatory Powers Bill, which is due to be published on Wednesday, are essential to fight serious crime and terrorism.
“As prime minister I would just say to people, ‘please, let’s not have a situation where we give terrorists, criminals, child abductors, safe spaces to communicate’. It’s not a safe space for them to communicate on a fixed-line telephone or a mobile phone, we shouldn’t allow the internet to be a safe space for them to communicate and do bad things,” he told ITV.
The home office has already said that it has watered down the Bill, dropping contentious plans to allow the police and security services access to the internet browsing history of everyone in the UK. The government is also understood to have abandoned a demand that internet service providers should give the authorities the ability to bypass encryption on all internet communications.
Former Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis warned this week that the Bill would not get through parliament unless it required judges to sign off of warrants allowing the monitoring of suspects online.
Mr Davis is part of a group of Conservative MPs concerned about civil liberties and known as the Runnymede Tories, after the place where Magna Carta was signed 800 years ago. If they join forces with the opposition, these rebel Conservatives could help to defeat the government, which has a majority of just 12.
Accountable
The government wants to keep oversight of spying warrants in the hands of ministers, arguing that they, unlike judges, are accountable to the people for their actions. They also claim that, in the event of an urgent threat of terrorist attack, it could take too long to find a judge to sign the warrant.
Liberal Democrats scuppered the last Conservative attempt to expand surveillance when the two parties were in coalition in the 2012 so-called “Snoopers’ Charter”.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown said the government appeared to be moving in the right direction in dropping some of the most contentious elements of the bill but warned that it could be defeated in the House of Lords unless ministers caved in on judicial oversight.
“Some of the worst aspects of that have now been diminished. This is a power exercised not against a class of people but single individuals, evidence-based and subject to judicial oversight. Those are the three key principles, they are the principles we used in the era of the steaming kettle,” he said.
“If those principles have been preserved in this Bill I think the Bill looks to me like it would be far, far better than many imagined it would be but if it isn’t then we will use the House of Lords to ensure that it is.”
