Update: Since this leader was published the Investigatory Powers Bill has been announced. We cover it in more depth in this insight article.



BRITAIN’S spooks are normally a shy and retiring bunch. So it was a surprise to see them throw open their doors to the media over the past week. What was the occasion? Cynics suggested it was a charm offensive to drum up support for the Investigatory Powers Bill due to be read in Parliament this week.

The bill, dubbed a “snooper’s charter”, is intended to legitimise the surveillance regime revealed by Edward Snowden – run in the UK from GCHQ’s base near Cheltenham, which New Scientist also visited recently. As we went to press, the precise content of the bill was still under wraps. But even its outlines are worrying.


The bill proposes that internet service providers (ISPs) store everyone’s web browsing history for 12 months, accessible by the security services, police forces and tax collectors. Claims this can be done non-intrusively are nonsense: such metadata are inherently sensitive. People who think they are being watched behave differently. And given the recent massive hack of TalkTalk, one might doubt the ability of ISPs to keep such data safe.

The UK government – along with the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, its peers in the “Five Eyes” alliance – argues that such risks are worth taking because it will help them to fight terrorism. The problem, of course, is that the evidence that might help us judge whether it really will is secret: so we are simply asked to trust they will do the right thing.

Even if you are minded to extend such trust, the bill remains worrying, because it shows little grasp of technological reality. The path to the new bill began with prime minister David Cameron’s pledge to ban encryption, thus leaving no “safe spaces” where terrorists could hide.

“David Cameron’s pledge to ban encryption would have made online commerce impossible”

Unfortunately, that would also have made online commerce impossible, so has been watered down to a requirement that firms provide access to unencrypted communications. That would merely outlaw vastly popular encrypted services like WhatsApp.

This is still unworkable. Anyone with a little technical know-how can download or even write software to send encrypted messages without using a service provider. The maths on which the technology is built cannot be legislated out of existence.

The government also seems to think it can legislate chemistry. Its Psychoactive Substances Bill proposes to ban any substance that alters mental state. Taken at face value, that’s everything from chocolate to flowers. As the deep absurdity of this has sunk in, the government has drafted a list of exempt substances. Homeopathic pills will be on it, we are assured: caffeine products are fine, too, as long as they contain both caffeine and, somehow, “no psychoactive substance”.

This pattern of ill-conceived pledges followed by impractical legislation looks ominously as though it will be repeated in energy and healthcare. That suggests the government is either scientifically illiterate or believes it can get its way by assuming its citizens are. On the side of illiteracy, we have the new minister for energy and climate change, Andrea Leadsom, who said one of her first questions on taking up her post was “is climate change real?” Meanwhile, health secretary Jeremy Hunt continues to imply that a rise in deaths at the weekend should be tackled by increasing staffing levels, even though the editor of medical journal The BMJ wrote a well-publicised letter to him last month to complain that he had misrepresented a key study on the subject.

Ideological stances may win wide support even if they don’t make sense. But pity those charged with enforcing the flawed laws that result. As it happens, police forces are mounting rigorous trials to find out which interventions are actually effective at reducing crime – a far cry from a reliance on gut instinct. It is a pity those making the laws don’t seem to share that willingness to try thinking before they act.

(Image: Sven Hoppe/DPA/Corbis)

This article appeared in print under the headline “Counter-intelligence”