14 DAY TRIAL // As the British lawmakers seem to be in a frenzy to pass a bill that would only strengthen the powers of the intelligence community, Edward Snowden, the man behind the NSA leaks, is condemning the situation.
The whistleblower tells The Guardian that it is quite unusual for a bill of this type to be moved through the Parliament without any public debate and with such urgency.
Snowden points out that such emergency laws are usually passed in times of war, while there are currently no bombs falling and no U-boats harboring the British shores. The fact that this bill has become a priority so suddenly, after the government ignored it for an entire year, is highly suspicious.
“I mean, the NSA could have written this draft,” Snowden notices as he reads through the documents, indicating that a similar decision was taken in the United States in 2007 when the Protect America Act was introduced after citing terrorist threats.
“They passed it under the same sort of emergency justification. They said we would be at risk. They said companies will no longer cooperate with us. We’re losing valuable intelligence that puts the nation at risk,” the whistleblower says.
Snowden isn’t the only one showing concern about the new bills, especially since the European Union has been doing its best to abolish this type of laws within the member countries. Civil liberties groups have expressed skepticism after the British government said that the new bill would not increase the powers of the surveillance agencies, when, in fact, it simply creates a way for the United Kingdom to ignore the EU-wide trend of pushing such bills outside the law.
What this bill does is allow the government to order phone companies to keep records on their customers for twelve months. The records include not only the phone numbers and identities of those everyone talked to, but also the addresses of websites visited in the past year.
The European Court of Justice has recently declared that such laws are invalid, while nations across the European Union have been declaring them as unconstitutional.
“We are being told that if we don’t give the government new authorities immediately without any debate, just taking their word for it, despite the fact that these exact authorities were just declared unlawful by the European Court of Justice, we’ll pay a price. Would it be so costly to take a few days to debate where the line should be drawn about these authorities and what really serves the public interest?” Snowden is asking.
And while the British government keeps saying that the intelligence community would not get any additional surveillance powers, the Guardian writes that internal Home Office papers seen by the newspaper confirm exactly the opposite. Not only would the spy agencies gain news rights within the UK, but it would also give the country unprecedented powers to force foreign companies to comply with interception warrants and requests for user communications or for built-in interception capabilities into their products and infrastructure.