The surveillance bill is flawed but at last we have oversight

So writes Nick Clegg:

When the Edward Snowden revelations were first published, the knee-jerk response from the government was to play the man and ignore the ball. The debate online and in the pages of the Guardian was taking off, and civil society groups were beginning to mount legal challenges in the investigatory powers tribunal. But most ministers simply didn’t understand – whatever concerns they may have had about Snowden’s own behaviour – the significance of the fact the world now knew the government’s most closely guarded secrets. They refused to acknowledge that the democratisation of the security state had become inevitable.

Meanwhile, the Home Office hadn’t deviated from its robotic approach to demanding ever greater powers. It had presented successive governments with near-identical proposals for broad new internet surveillance powers – the so-called “snooper’s charter” – without sufficient thought for our privacy and without any serious effort to justify them on the basis of operational need…

The new, revised proposals on the storage of web browsing data remain problematic as the bill appears to call for the storage of vast quantities of data that goes far beyond the operational requirements set out by the home secretary in the Commons. The so called “double lock” of judicial oversight appears to be nothing of the sort, as judges will have very little discretion when making decisions about individual warrants. And many will question the access the intelligence agencies have to our phone records.

Read Nick Clegg’s piece on the Snoopers’ Charter in full here.