14 DAY TRIAL // Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, is joining in the long list of people demanding that the United Kingdom pass a digital bill of rights to protect citizens from intelligence agencies in the country.
The computer scientist said on Saturday that a digital bill of rights was mandatory to protect citizens against the government’s “indiscriminate online surveillance,” which has been proven by the NSA top secret files exposed by Edward Snowden last year.
Berners-Lee was speaking at the Web We Want Festival which took place in London this past weekend. During the event, he took the time to lobby politicians to take action before the elections that are scheduled for next May.
The father of the World Wide Web considers that it is crucial for the future of the United Kingdom for people to have trust in the Internet. “Our tech sector has led the way out of recession, creating more jobs than any other industry in recent years,” he pointed out.
“A Britain in which people no longer trust the Web as a safe and private place will be a Britain that is less free, less creative and ultimately less prosperous,” Berners-Lee claims.
2015 Elections – the perfect reason to create the bill
He continues, saying that the 2015 General Election is an opportunity for party leaders to reverse this worrying trend by committing to end indiscriminate online surveillance by enacting a digital bill of rights.
This isn’t the first time he made such a statement and it will likely won’t be the last. As long as the NSA, the GCHQ and all its spy agency friends from the Five Eyes continue snooping in on people, Berners-Lee and everyone else advocating for a free Internet and complete online privacy will continue asking for the return of the basic human right to privacy, even if in the online medium.
Given his opinion on the necessity for the freedom of the Internet, it should be interesting to see what he thinks of the statements made by the chief of the department fighting against online piracy from the City of London Police.
Andy Fyfe recently claimed that he wanted the government to step up and impose some regulations on the Internet, to stop it from going into complete anarchy, in order to put a stop to online piracy. He is asking, more or less, for the government to start getting involved in censoring the Internet in order to protect the business interest of some.