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@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-t... 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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