Companies to face criminal offence if they tip off U.K. users about snooping

There are many who not only remain unconcerned but often seek to diminish or dismiss concern as hyperbole or exaggerated, often by pointing to the current status quo.<p>No one is interested in you the individual, but they are certainly interested in building the capability to track all individuals and preempt anything that threatens any entrenched status quo.<p>We are not currently a police state but we are certainly building the capability and the cultural language to justify it. The moral high ground and the entire framework of values that powered it have shown to be near meaningless by the alarming ease with which they have been discarded in favour of the language of security and paranoia. Everyone is safe in a cage. It will be naive to believe in the context of how modern states operate that a cluster of extreme right wing medievalists in the ME are bringing on this state of affairs, the bulk and most powerful of whom are paradoxically our best friends in the region.<p>Surveillance states are not a on&#x2F;off thing, you don&#x27;t suddenly wake one day to a surveillance state. These capabilities take time to build, but once the infrastructure is in place it will inevitably get used.<p>In this case we can see all the pieces being put in place methodically with language that makes George Orwell look astonishingly prescient. And its the self absorption of this generation who have inherited and enjoyed a relatively &#x27;free&#x27; and equal state with &#x27;hope for improvement&#x27; but are going to willfully pass on something more ominous.

This is absolutely retarded.. If I were apple, google, and facebook, and twitter - companies that ARE nations unto themselves in terms of user reach, I would start some sort of embargo, countries that enforce these kind of rules, simply ban all traffic from the country. Imagine the social upheaval and political capital the UK would lose if facebook, google, twitter, apple, bing, etc...all were no longer accessible. No more funny cat videos on youtube or facebook? Brits would go crazy, and get angry, and the politicians who made the rules, would get outted pretty darn fast and never be elected again.

There&#x27;s some of this present already in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act from the early 2000s. And the all-pervasive Official Secrets Act. Those of us who are old enough to remember the bizarre half-censorship of Gerry Adams on TV know that free speech has never had an overriding legal status in the UK.

So the security services can demand information and order the fact kept secret in perpetuity, with no appeal. How very reassuring.

If this goes through Warrant Canaries will become much more popular.

Imagine how useful a wiretap would be if the phone company immediately notified the target. I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s anything unreasonable about this amendment. Something similar is probably already the case for telephone and postal surveillance, and this was just a previous oversight in the law.<p>I think there&#x27;s a case for having a time-limit after which the surveillance must be disclosed, unless a judge thinks there&#x27;s a very good reason not to for a specific case. I believe that&#x27;s how this works in the US. Unfortunately, the UK&#x27;s version of surveillance oversight is typically ministerial oversight, which is not very encouraging.

Would a company making an assertion that it wasn&#x27;t being snooped on before they were actually snooped be guilty of fraud after the fact has changed? Given they can&#x27;t say they are not being snooped on...

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The U.K. is a constitutional monarchy. There is no concept of &quot;we the people&quot; bottom up delegation of power to form a government; it&#x27;s top down, the people are subjects. That members of parliament are elected means the monarch&#x27;s power is limited, rather than the source of the power of government and its authority coming from the people. So it&#x27;s a different system than in the U.S., so when talking about traditional values don&#x27;t assume western democracies are all really pretty much the same thing. There are important differences. And in this case, I expect the vast majority of British will have no problem with this kind of surveillance.<p>However, the company asserting it&#x27;s not the surveillance branch of the government where it does business, is legitimate. Whether it&#x27;ll make any difference is a separate question.