Hey,
I'm on the board of the Open Rights Group
<https://www.openrightsgroup.org/people/board> as well as a Wikipedian
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:OwenBlacker>; I typed a long response
last night, then got distracted and somehow Google Inbox lost it.
At the moment, it's a draft bill up for consultation
<http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/science-and-technology-committee/inquiries/parliament-2015/investigatory-powers-bill-technology-issues-inquiry-launch-15-16/>.
There's been a lot of evidence given to the Joint Bill Committee
(membership analysis coming next), including oral evidence from Bill Binney
<http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-01/06/mass-surveillance-william-binney-nsa-uk-ip-bill>
(formerly a tech chief at the NSA and now a surveillance dissident)
plus a whole
bunch of written evidence
<https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Written_evidence_to_Draft_Investigatory_Powers_Bill_Joint_Committee>
and
plenty of commentary (ORG
<https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2015/investigatory-powers-bill>, Brass
Horn <https://investigatorypowersbill.uk/>, Glyn Moody
<http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/11/snoopers-charter-web-browsing-history-stored-for-a-year-no-bans-on-encryption/>,
for example).
There was a Scrambling for Safety conference
<https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/sfs-2016.html> last week discussing the
issues; George Danezis <https://twitter.com/GDanezis> of UCL has written up
the first
<https://conspicuouschatter.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/notes-on-scrambling-for-safety-2016-session-1/>
and
second
<https://conspicuouschatter.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/notes-on-scrambling-for-safety-2016-equipment-interference-session/>
of the three sessions already; Will Heath (of the ORG AC) put together
a Storify
of tweets from the event
<https://storify.com/wmheath/scrambling-for-safety-2016>. (I totally
haven't done my write-up, yet.)
Unofficially, and I'd rather not be quoted in public on this, we're pretty
pessimistic about getting any realistic change to the draft bill. The
public is pretty disengaged from the issue — partly because our media
environment in the UK is pathetically ineffectual and most of the press
considered the Snowden revelations to be *The Guardian*'s story and so
simply didn't report on it. Our parliamentarians have always been pretty
vulnerable to arguments about being "soft on crime" and "soft on
terrorism"
and have rarely contemplated anything so radical as "evidence-based
policymaking".
Equally, while there's a libertarian strain to the Tories, Theresa May is
widely respected within the party. Labour, on the other hand, are often
quite authoritarian (see yet another attempt to reintroduce ID cards
<http://www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?id=2016-01-14a.454.0> this week!),
even if they weren't distracted by tearing themselves apart over their
party leadership. The Parliamentary arithmetic simply does not bode well
for us this time around.
Complicating matters is that the European Court of Human Rights is becoming
increasingly critical of untargetted surveillance
<https://cdt.org/blog/did-the-european-court-of-human-rights-just-outlaw-massive-monitoring-of-communications-in-europe/>,
but the British Government has never really cared what European courts
think — and the Tories are considering pulling out of the Council of Europe
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/11840747/Camerons-plan-to-leave-ECHR-encourages-Putin-says-EU-chief.html>
(hello, Belarus!), as well as the EU, in order to repeal the Human Rights
Act 1998 <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Human_Rights_Act_1998>
because of the pesky rights it gives to people they dislike.
To answer your original question, the gag order would apply to whoever were
served with a warrant — that would probably be WMF centrally (the bill also
includes claims to universal jurisdiction), rather than a specific project
or sysadmin. Warrants would more likely be served on ISPs, though, than
content providers like WMF, I would expect.
If there are other questions, I can probably get you answers. But we are
not confident at preventing this police-state bullshit this time round, I'm
afraid :o(
Owen
On Fri, 15 Jan 2016 at 17:32 James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
UK Wikimedians or anyone who knows:
What is the status of this bill?
http://www.techspot.com/news/63292-tech-companies-face-criminal-charges-if-…
<http://www.techspot.com/news/63292-tech-companies-face-criminal-charges-if-they-notify.html?>
Will it apply to WMF projects? Individual sysadmins?
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