The move comes amid mounting concerns that militants are increasingly recruiting and planning attacks online, and amid intelligence warnings that Britain is under greater threat of attack.
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The bill gives explicit legal blessing to intelligence agencies’ long-secret powers to intercept communications on a vast scale – details of which were made public by U.S. National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.
But many internet users will still be alarmed to discover that this private information is being stored for a year.
The new powers are billed as a way for the police to check up on the internet history of suspected criminals and missing people, and police said they need the powers because the scale of online activity meant traditional methods of surveillance and investigation were becoming less effective.
The Prime Minister insisted the UK’s spies and police needed to be able to see who suspects had communicated with over the internet.
Councils will be banned from accessing ICRs, while a new offence of “knowingly or recklessly obtaining communications data” will be created for cases of abuse. “We will conduct that negotiation and put that package of revised relationship that we have with Europe, the reforms that we have negotiated to British people to decide”, she said.
If a warrant is granted – then agencies will be able to access individual web pages you’ve been looking at too.
Nothing short of this fundamental safeguard should comfort the public or Parliament that this much-anticipated new Bill is an improvement on the past’.
It is also likely that telecommunications companies will be ordered to retain a few data which would disclose the websites visited by their customers for 12 months.
The Investigatory Powers Bill (PDF), drafted by British Home Secretary Theresa May, covers a wide spectrum of government surveillance activities, including the bulk collection of data, the interception of communications, and the hacking and bugging of electronic equipment.
However, it will need to happen sooner than that now: the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act – which was rushed through Parliament as an “emergency” measure backed by all sides of the House in 2014 – was found to be unlawful by the High Court in July this year.
The Investigatory Power Bill will establish “world-leading oversight to govern an investigatory powers regime which is more open and transparent than anywhere else in the world”, May was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.
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Welcoming the bill as a decisive moment in updating Britain’s surveillance laws, May said: “There should be no area of cyberspace which is a haven for those who seek to harm us to plot, poison minds and peddle hatred under the radar”.
