Comment: Labour must support judicial warrants for surveillance
The Labour leadership can go a long way to ensuring there are sufficient safeguards on our information and privacy
The Labour leadership can go a long way to ensuring there are sufficient safeguards on our information and privacy
Freedoms cannot be given up for the nebulous cause of ‘security’.
Citizens’ rights to data protection and privacy must be protected.
On Monday the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper gave a speech at demos.
As Socialist and Democrat spokesperson on Justice and Home Affairs in the European Parliament, I know that the European Union has been pushing hard to create the first piece of international legislation on data protection – the Data Protection Regulation and Directive – which would help enshrine much needed citizen’s protections in the internet age.
The United States of America is not one for letting things go. So when Edward Snowden – a 29-year old CIA employee seconded to the NSA – leaked classified information on highly-secretive surveillance systems, he will have known that his days of anonymity and free-living were numbered.
Whilst blanket surveillance will inevitably bring some law enforcement gains, monitoring of an entire population smacks of authoritarianism, and will undermine the proud reputation for liberty we have developed as the oldest unbroken democracy in the world.
An extnesion of State snooping and surveillance powers simply cannot be allowed to happen on the Lib Dems’ watch, says the Social Liberal Forum’s Prateek Buch.
The Daily Mail was in full ‘outraged’ mode today over Zac Goldsmith’s comments to the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions yesterday, reports Shamik Das.
The Leveson Inquiry takes a break today, at the end of a week in which celebrities and ordinary people have testified to the abhorrence of the tabloid press.