Mass Surveillance

70 organizations, cyber security experts, and elected officials sign open letter expressing dangers of Online Safety Bill On 24 November, seventy civil society organizations, companies, elected officials, and cybersecurity experts, including Global Encryption Coalition members, published an open letter to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak highlighting their concerns with the threat that the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Bill poses to end-to-end encryption.

Recently, we saw how police threatened and in a couple of cases, arrested, anti-monarchy protesters, following the death of the late queen Elizabeth II, The images were widely circulated on social media and the police eventually were forced to acknowledge that these protests were, in fact, lawful.

The Online Safety Bill Campaign Hub is a place for members of the public, campaigners, politicians and experts to take action, and find out more about the issues around the Online Safety Bill.

The deployment of client-side scanning on private messaging systems was trailed in a recent research paper published by the technical directors of GCHQ and the National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC).

The Online Safety Bill requires ALL online speech to be monitored for “harmful content”, including the private conversations you have on your phone with friends and family.

In 2013, following Edward Snowden’s disclosure of information about major national mass surveillance programmes, the Open Rights Group teamed up with Privacy International, English PEN, and Dr Constanze Kurz, a German computer scientist, to mount a legal challenge against the UK Government’s mass surveillance of the internet.

In January 2018, the Court of Appeal delivered judgment in a case regarding the Government’s “Snooper’s Charter” provisions, found in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, and in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.