Saturday 12 July 2014
Forcing through the surveillance laws is a further erosion of political trust
‘In April, when the European court said Britain’s data retention laws breached two of our fundamental rights – the right to privacy and the right to protection of personal data – I started to lobby Labour’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, as to what a possible reform might look like. With surveillance on the agenda like never before following the Guardian’s publication of the Edward Snowden revelations, I thought we should draw a line in the sand.
I got no response, so I wrote again in June, this time because security and terrorism chief Charles Farr had for the first time confirmed that GCHQ was conducting the mass surveillance of every British citizen using Google, Facebook and YouTube channels.
In June the Home Office told me that it had no plans to update our data retention regulations in light of the European judgment. Either the Home Office has terrible legal advice, or they were cooking something up behind closed doors. Both should worry us.’
