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The UK Snooper’s Charter, which is the UK investigatory Power’s Bill, but famously known with the former name by most of its critics has now been successfully passed as a law. The law, among other things, brings corporations and tech firms to start storing their data in bulk and be able to hand it over to the government, while at the same time they are also supposed to hand over the data in its unencrypted form to the authorities.
Most tech giants have tried to continue pushing against the bill and the most intrusive factors of it, with some even looking at ways they could circumvent the surveillance features in the bill. They want to do this by offering some privacy enhancing services to their customers.
Some critics of the charter claim that if information is handed over in the unencrypted form, it could eventually fall into the wrong hands and be used against the people, but the government claims it is not so, and only the government will be able to use it. As a result, some VPN service providers have already started to counter on the privacy issues brought up as a result and are offering services which can conceal traffic for users.
The chairman for the Internet Service Providers Association, James Blessing said that all it took was for one cyber attacker to get there and steal the information. Even after enforcing some security measures, someone will still come and outsmart you into taking the information, he noted.
The VP of Product Strategy at Lieberman Software said that the new Snooper Charter showed that the law and the law makers themselves had a difficult time trying to keep the technology and its corresponding constituents well informed. Sander said that even after assuming that the government itself was not going to abuse the power they had, the issue still arose of whether the bad guys would be kept out of the government perimeter and away from the information.
He also said that the people who were going to be affected mostly would be the uninformed and average user, because other people would just third party security apps which are not created by the manufacturer so that they could keep their data safe.
Sander also noted that the Snooper Charter ignored the entire current technology trend in relation to how terrorists and hackers could steal data and use it for their own gain.
However, as a result of the introduction of the bill, the demand for VPNs has risen. A spokesperson for the NordVPN application, Jodi Myers said that last year when the data retention law was put into effect in Australia they noticed a boom, and it seemed like the same could be said for the UK, as there has been an increase in the number of enquiries.
Myers said that the company had a zero log policy and since they were based in Panama, they didn’t have any data retention laws applying to them.
