Deputy PM: Rip up Snoop Charter, 'go back to the drawing board'
Bruised Home Sec admits she'll 'accept the substance' of gripes against net spy law
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Home Secretary Theresa May said she will "accept the substance of recommendations" for her draft surveillance law after the Deputy Prime Minister told her to rewrite it - and a parliamentary report slammed it as "suspicious" and "too sweeping".
A joint select committee of MPs and peers, in a report published this morning, urged the Home Office to rip up many aspects of May's "Snoopers' Charter", which proposed granting cops and spooks powers to monitor citizens online to combat paedophiles and terrorists.
The panel suggested May start again by listening to telcos, civil liberty campaigners and police bodies.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also waded in, saying the Tory-led coalition government - of which his Lib Dem party is the junior member - needed to have a "fundamental rethink" about the proposed legislation.
"We cannot proceed with this bill and we have to go back to the drawing board," Clegg said. He echoed the joint committee's criticism of the bill by highlighting its wide-ranging scope, the £1.8bn price tag, the need for wider consultation and the apparent lack of appropriate safeguards.
The deputy PM added:
The committee did not, however, suggest that nothing needs to be done. They were very clear that there is a problem that must be addressed to give law enforcement agencies the powers they need to fight crime. I agree.
But that must be done in a proportionate way that gets the balance between security and liberty right. Any modernisation of the powers, including possible new legislation, must meet the concerns of the joint committee by having the best possible safeguards and keeping costs under control.
In a preemptive move against her critics, May today took to the pages of The Sun, where she has repeatedly sought the support of the tabloid's readership for the proposed new law, to repeat her warning that child abusers and terrorists could "plot horrific crimes" online if they are not curtailed by the authorities monitoring web activity.
"We must not get left behind. You and your loved ones have the right to expect the government to protect you from harm," she pleaded, before conceding:
Politicians from all parties have agreed that new laws are needed to help the police keep pace with changing technology. Parliament has made suggestions about how our plans could be improved and we will accept the substance of its recommendations.
May claimed - despite what is now a major setback for her plans to massively increase the surveillance of people using the web and other communication technologies - that she would "not allow these vitally important laws to be delayed any longer in this Parliament".
But her proposal has now been derailed by parliamentarians who all agreed that May's draft bill needed reeling in.
Malcolm Hutty of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) said that "any new legislation must be much more tightly scoped" and added that LINX "look forward to working with the Home Office on developing proportionate requirements for communications data storage and access". ®
COMMENTS
Okay,
Keep a eye out, everyone, for the same provisions coming in dribs and drabs over the next few years in things like a Waste Refuse Bill or a Duck Hunting legislation, until the law is there in essence if not in name.
You don't need it. How do I know? Because you've not needed it for the last 2000 years and there's no reason to suggest it would have helped in any recent incident, conviction or operation. The terrorist threat? Haven't really seen much since we joined the global bully in pounding everyone in the playground when their tower of bricks got knocked over, over ten years ago. So you're doing a sterling job with that already and can't see what else you would need to do that job given that.
Paedophiles? I don't think Jimmy Saville was airing his (still alleged at this point, I believe) likes all over the Internet under encryption and anonymous usernames. What found him was people being able to talk to the police (those police whose numbers you're slicing at the moment) and not have a corrupt media willing to brush their claims under the carpet "for the sake of charidee..." (and that's being handled too, if you pull your finger out and stop Wikipedia'ing things and start punishing the press to the standards that the existing law already holds them too).
Stop enforcing the laws that exist, and stop making up new ones rather than do so.
Typo?
If you mean "START enforcing the laws that exist, and stop making up new ones rather than do so." then I'm with you...
@Tom 38 "I recently did jury service..."
I recently did jury service, and the key thing that connected (and convicted) the defendants was their copious phone communications and locations as reported by their phones (combined with their insistence that they didn't know each other). It is clear to me that this information is genuinely useful to convict criminals of their acts
So what you're saying is that the existing laws enabled the authorities to connect these people to each other and the crime through their communications?
In that case, you've just undermined the need for the new law straight away haven't you?
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