
MPs win surveillance powers legal challenge - callum85
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33564442
======
icanhackit
The legislation was rushed through to protect what had long been in place now
that it was exposed. Politicians, constantly worried about risk exposure, love
surveillance. It's cheap and probably effective, as much as we like to argue
that it isn't. If someone hurts a bunch of people then a whole lot of bullshit
has to take place: inquiries, increases in resources to bullshit cause X,
better police funding etc. They're down with having their kid's selfies,
wife's neurotic texts, dick pics, GPS data etc sucked into a great spy
apparatus because they care about their careers more than the great digital
kaiju that privacy advocates have worried about since George Orwell summed up
what was to come in his book 1984.

The real conspiracy: we're governed by emotionally unsophisticated,
intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress,
and surveillance is a tool that helps them get what they value with minimal
effort.

~~~
pjc50
_down with having their kid 's selfies, wife's neurotic texts, dick pics, GPS
data etc sucked into a great spy apparatus_

I don't think they are, really, it's just that they haven't thought about it
and don't really understand that mass surveillance means _everybody_ , not
just the bad guys.

(Consider my favourite bit of narrowly-drafted legislation,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act)
: rather than address privacy in any general way, go after the particular leak
that embarrased a particular candidate)

~~~
bmelton
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's
time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws
are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to
be stopped at all."

\- H.L. Mencken

------
an_ko
The term "emergency legislation" always makes me nervous. Laws are the
nation's source code; precise wide-scoped constraints that need careful
design. I'm happy this legal equivalent of technical debt is being combated,
but how did this happen in the first place? Who decides a piece of legislation
must be "fast-tracked"?

~~~
mseebach
> Laws are the nation's source code

Not really. Laws are the nation's monitoring server's source code. Further
more, the monitoring server is running on a notoriously buggy, laggy and leaky
interpreter, and most of the systems interfacing with the monitoring server
uses arcane, often proprietary, and always poorly documented protocols.

Amazingly, most of the time it pretty much just works, although the
interesting (and severe!) bugs are all surfaced through user reports, never
from a monitoring alert.

But yeah, not the sort of thing you'd want to emergency patch a lot.
Unfortunately, no staging environment exists.

~~~
JupiterMoon
To follow the analogy. This is why changes usually undergo serious code review
prior to being pushed to production. This bill underwent none of that - in
fact it reimplemented with bug compatibility a broken module that had been
removed from production previously.

------
peteretep
Can't help but feel we are incredibly lucky to have a free press in the UK. A
free (and very aggressive) press means that snooped-upon data about MPs
themselves will become valuable enough, and considered public interest enough,
that it'll get purchased and published, which in turn motivates MPs to vote
against its collection in the first place.

~~~
nailer
I agree that many politicians wouldn't care about privacy unless they
themselves were threatened, but I also think David Davis and Tom Watson
genuinely care about everyone's right to privacy as an ethical matter.

They're [https://twitter.com/daviddavismp](https://twitter.com/daviddavismp)
and [https://twitter.com/tom_watson](https://twitter.com/tom_watson) on
Twitter and well worth following.

~~~
switch007
He's an overview what he cares about:
[http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10162/david_davis/haltempri...](http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10162/david_davis/haltemprice_and_howden/votes)

Typical Tory with a few strong opinions in some areas.

------
jackgavigan
This is terrific news! Coming so soon after the Anderson Report[1], this will
add to the case for a comprehensive review and redrafting of surveillance
legislation, and an open debate about how we preserve privacy while providing
the intelligence services and police with the tools they need to investigate
and prevent terrorism and organised crime.

1:
[http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/11/surveillance-...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/11/surveillance-
anderson-report)

------
diocles
The ruling itself is available - it's quite a long read:

[https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/david-davis-and-
other...](https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/david-davis-and-others-v-
secretary-of-state-for-the-home-department/)

~~~
gbuk2013
Thanks for the link - it was long but very readable.

Here is the summary of why the courts decided against the government:

\----

a) [s1 of DRIPA] does not lay down clear and precise rules providing for
access to and use of communications data retained pursuant to a retention
notice to be strictly restricted to the purpose of preventing and detecting
precisely defined serious offences or of conducting criminal prosecutions
relating to such offences; and

b) access to the data is not made dependent on a prior review by a court or an
independent administrative body whose decision limits access to and use of the
data to what is strictly necessary for the purpose of attaining the objective
pursued.

\----

My personal interpretation of the reasoning in the ruling is that while a more
broad data _retention_ framework is OK for practicality reasons (i.e. it is
not practical to know in advance that a person is suspected of a serious
crime, nor is it practical to restrict retention to only such persons as it
may be necessary to look at data of other people as part of an investigation
targeted at a person suspected of committing the serious crime), it must be
accompanied by protections at the _access_ level (i.e. such access must be
tightly restricted and judged to be necessary by a qualified independent body
based on the facts of the specific case).

------
higherpurpose
This comes at the right time, as the Tories are also trying to pass much worse
surveillance legislation where they want to bypass the judges and only have
the Home Secretary sign the "warrants" for mass surveillance (so even worse
than the rubber-stamping secret FISA Court in the US).

This ruling specifically says that it's illegal because the investigations
aren't vetted by judges or independent third party bodies, among other
reasons.

------
swombat
Good news, but it still can be appealed, isn't applied immediately, etc. In
the meantime, the spy agencies have complete unfettered access to everything,
as I understand it.

~~~
a3n
Didn't they have complete, unfettered access before this legislation? Wasn't
it just a law that made legal what they were doing anyway, and will do
regardless?

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ionised
Well this was unexpected.

