Join Our Legal Challenge Against Our Authoritarian Surveillance Regime

The Snoopers' Charter re-introduced the same powers that have just been declared illegal - and added new, even more intrusive, ones. But creating a new law for 2017 cannot let the Government circumvent the human rights law that protects us. So today Liberty has launched The People vs the Snoopers' Charter - a legal challenge against this authoritarian surveillance regime, backed by the ordinary people subjected to its gaze.
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Since the Snoopers' Charter - or Investigatory Powers Act - passed in November, everything you've done online, every phone call you've made, every text message you've sent, every place you've been with your phone has been stored in a database by order of the British Government. And it's been made accessible to everyone from the taxman to the Department for Work and Pensions - as well as other governments, like that of the United States.

Under the new law, authorities have also been granted powers to hack thousands of devices at once - without any reason for suspicion - simply to make sure they can keep listening in on everything you do, all the time.

All this surveillance is supposed to keep us safe from terrorists who want to attack our democracy - but what could be more undemocratic, more dangerous, and more defeatist than treating all British citizens like suspects and tearing apart the freedoms that define us?

These are digital stop and search powers with unprecedented secrecy and sophistication - on steroids. The potential for discrimination, persecution and abuse is unthinkable.

President-elect Trump has already committed to using his arsenal of mass surveillance powers against all Muslims and anti-racism activists. What might the UK Government of today or moreover, tomorrow, do with such totalitarian-style powers?

We have long expected to be able to correspond, meet, telephone one another, read newspapers, enjoy radio and films, join political parties, explore faiths, visit libraries, travel, demonstrate, seek medical advice, take and share photographs, and express ourselves freely and without the watchful eye of the state. But with our daily lives increasingly digitised, pervasive surveillance under the Snoopers' Charter rips those freedoms away and reshapes British values for the future, almost beyond recognition.

Ironically, the Snoopers' Charter not only attacks our democratic values, but jeopardises our cybersecurity. The Government can now force tech companies like Apple to remove encryption and weaken the security of their own products in total secrecy. This means easy mass surveillance for the State, but an increased risk of criminal hacking for us.

Meanwhile, internet providers are now forced to create records of our every online move - what websites we visit on our computers, what apps we use on our phones - and store them, ready for the State to access. TalkTalk wasn't even able to protect its customers' credit card details from hacking last year.

So whose hands will your internet history end up in, exactly? If you thought the Ashley Madison hack was bad, I fear you've seen nothing yet.

If this worries you, you're not alone. Since the Snoopers' Charter was passed by Parliament in November, over 200,000 people have signed a petition calling for its repeal. The Government dismissed those who signed, refusing to debate the Act further.

But the Government cannot dismiss human rights. And the Government cannot dismiss 200,000 people with human rights law on their side.

Just before Christmas, Liberty and Tom Watson MP won a legal challenge against the Government's previous surveillance law at the EU Court of Justice.

The Court declared that the mass hoarding of our communication logs and internet histories is unnecessary and "cannot be considered to be justified, within a democratic society" - rendering the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act unlawful. The Court also ruled that allowing the police to authorise their own access to our personal information, and to do so without any suspicion of a serious crime, was a breach of rights.

This was a massive victory for our civil liberties in the digital age.

The Snoopers' Charter re-introduced the same powers that have just been declared illegal - and added new, even more intrusive, ones. But creating a new law for 2017 cannot let the Government circumvent the human rights law that protects us.

So today Liberty has launched The People vs the Snoopers' Charter - a legal challenge against this authoritarian surveillance regime, backed by the ordinary people subjected to its gaze.

Liberty will be representing the many thousands of people who are determined to stand up for civil liberties. We'll be challenging new powers to hack our devices en masse, to listen in on millions of innocent people's communications, collect our phone records, and watch our every move online.

This is a rare chance to be part of a movement that defines our freedoms - not just today, but for the future. Liberty has defended human rights and civil liberties for 80 years, but we must all work together to keep defending them in the digital realm. This could be the beginning of the end for mass surveillance in the UK, The most authoritarian law ever passed in this country will be defeated by the people.

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