May vows to monitor all website use as plans for controversial ‘snoopers’ charter’ are unveiled 7


James Slack writes in the Daily Mail:

Plans for a hugely controversial ‘snoopers’ charter’ giving the police, security services and taxman the power to monitor the public’s every internet click will be unveiled today.

Home Secretary Theresa May is braced for a bruising battle with civil liberties groups, backbench MPs and some internet companies over the so-called Big Brother legislation.

In a significant compromise, hundreds of public bodies, including Town Halls, will be denied any access to the new regime, which critics claim is still unprecedented in the free world.

Other organisations, such as NHS trusts and the Environment Agency, will have to make a case before Parliament if they want to gain access to the communications data.

The only agencies who will be automatically given the new powers are the police, security officials, the new National Crime Agency and HMRC.

The concession is an attempt to win over the many critics of the legislation – which the Home Office has been trying to introduce in a variety of different guises for six years.


7 thoughts on “May vows to monitor all website use as plans for controversial ‘snoopers’ charter’ are unveiled

  • Tom Welsh

    In the discussion of “tagging” criminals on the BBC’s Today programme this morning, I heard it suggested that the latest tags will be able to show the authorities exactly where the wearer is at all times. (Whereas the current tags merely tell whether he has stayed in his house or left it). It was claimed that the new tags would help to reduce crime – the implication being, of course, that if an offender is known to have been at the scene of a crime at the time when it was committed, he is immediately in the frame and the onus is on him to prove he didn’t do it.

    A quick review of the reporting in the newspapers (using Google News) shows that not a single article mentions the new improved tags! Yet think about the logical implications. If making known offenders wear tags that continually report their exact position helps to detect crimes committed by those offenders – what about crimes committed by the rest of us? Especially those without criminal records? Wouldn’t it be logical to tag everyone in the country?

    No sooner has one contemplated that possibility than another thought occurs. Surely almost everyone in the country has already agreed, implicitly, to wear a new-generation tag – in the form of a mobile phone! It only remains to pass laws forcing diehard nut cases like myself to buy mobile phones, and everyone will be tagged.

    Orwell didn’t anticipate the half of it.

  • Cynthia Godfrey

    We must all get involved and once again fight this constant attack on our civil liberties. Write to your MP and protest as much as politeness allows. We have to accept that we have been politically manipulated by those who wish to enforce such controversial ideas. We as citizens have to protest whenever and wherever we can.

  • Cynthia Godfrey

    We must all get involved and once again fight this constant attack on our civil liberties. Write to your MP and protest as much as politeness allows. We have to accept that we have been politically manipulated by those who wish to enforce such controversial ideas. We as citizens have to protest whenever and wherever we can.

  • anon

    Curious what is no2id doing to engage those that can lobby against this instead of just relying on individuals and their MP’s?

    Has no one used freedom of information to review Mays expenses, emails whatever etc.

    After all, nothing to hide nothing to fear, right?.

  • anon

    Curious what is no2id doing to engage those that can lobby against this instead of just relying on individuals and their MP’s?

    Has no one used freedom of information to review Mays expenses, emails whatever etc.

    After all, nothing to hide nothing to fear, right?.

  • Michael Rogers

    Why has the question ” will US intelligence agencies ( directly or indirectly ) have access to the data ” not been asked ?

  • Michael Rogers

    Why has the question ” will US intelligence agencies ( directly or indirectly ) have access to the data ” not been asked ?

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