Home Sec: Let us have Snoop Charter or PEOPLE WILL DIE
Do what I want or bad things will happen to children
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Home Secretary Theresa May today claimed in The Sun that her draft law to massively ramp up online surveillance of Brits will "save lives".
The Tory minister managed to squeeze in a bit of last-minute lobbying ahead of the publication of a report by peers and MPs scrutinising her controversial communications data bill.
In an interview published today in the Murdoch-owned tabloid, May repeated the same points she made in April.
The Home Sec said of her snoopers' charter, which will cost £1.8bn to implement:
The people who say they’re against this bill need to look victims of serious crime, terrorism and child sex offences in the eye and tell them why they’re not prepared to give the police the powers they need to protect the public.
Anybody who is against this bill is putting politics before people’s lives. We would certainly see criminals going free as a result of this.
There will be paedophiles who will not be identified and it will reduce our ability to deal with this serious organised crime.
Her comments came after it emerged Lib Dem MPs in the UK coalition government may reject May's plans to increase the monitoring of citizens' web activities if she failed to address concerns laid out by cross-party peers and MPs on the influential Home Affairs Select Committee.
Their report is expected to be published within the next two weeks.
On Saturday, The Sun reported that Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg wants to stall plans to legislate greater snooping on internet communications - which would include requiring ISPs to retain sensitive subscriber data for 12 months - until 2014 to allow for further scrutiny of May's proposals. ®
COMMENTS
She may be right...
a snoopers charter may be able to prevent a death or two...
BUT
hundreds of thousands of people died to defend our freedom during World War II and that was considered a price worth paying. The attitude of May (and her friends in the Tory and Labour Parties) is that one death by a terrorist attack is too many, and it's worth undermining and abolishing every freedom we have if it can prevent a single death.
WRONG!
Creep
> serious crime, terrorism and child sex offences
All very laudable ... except we know from past experience of "anti-terrorism" laws that they get perverted, converted and subverted into general-purpose anti-anyone-we-don't-like laws. You can't pass a law to say "this will only be used against people we suspect of .... ", once a law is on the books, it becomes just another tool to be abused: like the chisel that gets used as a screwdriver - it wasn't designed for that, but that's what it gets used for if it's convenient.
So the scope of laws creep out from the well-intentioned uses they were first written for and become just another weight hanging around the neck of our freedoms. Great idea in theory - terrible implementation in practice.
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