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Star Comment: Giving away our privacy

THAT all three main parties lined up behind the supposedly “emergency” Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill is a depressing indication of consensus at the top.

With 33 honourable exceptions, MPs united to force through the Bill, most not having even bothered to attend the debate on its contents.

Home Secretary Theresa May insists that it merely extends current practice and contains no new powers for security services to snoop on citizens.

The trouble is that current practice was deemed unacceptable by the European Court of Justice back in April — since it insists on communications firms such as internet service providers and telecoms companies keeping track of everyone’s phone and email records for years.

The court ruled that this was a breach of citizens’ privacy, since the sheer volume of data being kept would allow spooks to piece together someone’s entire private life.

David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg are all apparently united in regarding the vast hoovering-up of people’s personal communications — exposed so dramatically by US whistleblower Edward Snowden last year — as essential for “fighting crime.”

But the Bill does not restrict the use of such powers to investigating serious crime. It provides for “blanket retention” of data.

Even in the United States, the fallout from Snowden’s revelation that Western intelligence agencies are exploiting modern technology to spy on citizens on a historically unprecedented scale resulted in some political debate.

Senators questioned how the burgeoning powers of the secret state could be reined in and President Barack Obama promised some limited reforms.

But in Britain it seems the Con-Dem coalition and her majesty’s loyal Opposition are equally indifferent to the steady erosion of our right to privacy.

As National Union of Journalists general secretary Michelle Stanistreet says, the impact of the Bill on the freedom of the press is “worryingly unclear” — just recall last August’s arbitrary detention of David Miranda for nine hours at Heathrow airport for questioning, seemingly under US pressure and for no better reason than that his partner had published some of the Snowden documents.

Similarly the British state has a long track record of harassing and intimidating political activists and those who engage in legitimate protest.

Security services have also been implicated in handing over information about trade unionists to private firms via the infamous Consulting Association, leading to many being unable to get work for years, with all the human cost that this entails.

And it isn’t only the state that has access to this data — hundreds of public bodies are authorised to do so, although the government has recently reduced the total. 

Even if the major parties all sincerely believe these sweeping powers are necessary — which they are not — we might have expected the Bill to be subjected to some parliamentary scrutiny.

Instead it was rushed through in a single day. This makes a mockery of Parliament’s duty to inspect the legislation it passes.

But this is not merely the coalition’s fault. Only a small minority of MPs made any objection to the truncated timetable. 

The sad conclusion is that most of the MPs in Parliament are not merely willing to give the secret services unlimited power to spy on their constituents — they don’t even care to know the details.

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