14 DAY TRIAL // Jimmy Wales is known to take up causes that have to do with internet freedom. More recently, he's been critical of the UK and the various problems there, like the extradition of TVShak's owner due to copyright charges in the US.
Now, he's complaining about a proposed law in the UK which would have ISPs monitor any page their customers visit and keep track of them up to a year, along with any text message or email they send.
ISPs and phone companies would store data on any traffic and conversation, but not the actual traffic data. Essentially, it would be a log on who is talking to whom.
This provision has plenty of people worried and for good reason. Keeping tabs on their citizens is something China or Iran might do, not a democratic country like the UK.
That's the theory at least, the FBI hanging on to records on 12 million iPhone, iPad and iPod users would certainly contradict the democratic country requirement.
Rights groups in the country along with major ISPs oppose the law and it's not hard to see why. Wales is worried about the proposed law and said that if it were to come into pass, websites would take steps to protect their users, including Wikipedia.
Encrypting all traffic to and from Wikipedia in the UK is a possibility he's put forward noting that it's not a very complicated change to implement.
"If we find that UK ISPs are mandated to keep track of every single webpage that you read at Wikipedia, I am almost certain we would immediately move to a default of encrypting all communication to the UK, so that the local ISP would only be able to see that you are speaking to Wikipedia, not what you are reading," Wales told to the members of Parliament working on the bill.
"That kind of response for us to do is not difficult. We don’t do it today because there doesn’t seem to be a dramatic need for it or any dramatic threat to our customers, but it’s something that I think we would do, absolutely," he added.