Jimmy Wales Won't Stand For the UK's Internet Tracking Bill

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is not too pleased with Parliament at the moment. British lawmakers are currently considering a bill known colloquially as the ’snooper’s charter’ that would track the Internet usage, texting habits and email correspondence of all British citizens. The bill would require Internet service providers like Vodafone and Virgin Media to retain and store 12 months of “traffic data” for every British citizen. That means Big Brother would keep track of literally every single web page visited as well as every text and email sent, including to whom and from where it was sent.

"It doesn't sound like something a civilised democracy wants to be involved with," Wales told MPs and peers while giving evidence to the joint committee on the Draft Communications Data Bill. "It's more like something I would expect from the Iranians or the Chinese, frankly."

And Wales won’t stand for it. Should Parliament pass the snooper’s charter, Wales says that Wikipedia will not cooperate. "If we find that UK ISPs are mandated to keep track of every single web page that you read at Wikipedia, I am almost certain we would immediately move to a default of encrypting all communication to the UK, so that the local ISP would only be able to see that you are speaking to Wikipedia, not what you are reading," Wales said. "That kind of response for us to do is not difficult." Wales added that the British government would have to resort to the "deep arts of hacking" to get around the encryption.

Wales isn’t the only one standing up against the snooper’s charter. Vodafone and Virgin Media have both voiced concern over the proposed measures not necessarily because of the obvious privacy concerns but rather because it would harm their business. Going through all the trouble of tracking users’ every move would put them at a competitive disadvantage, they say.

Of course, plenty of people are talking about the privacy concerns. The London Internet Exchange (Linx) told lawmakers that the bill would create a massive database that would become a “profiling engine” and “an enormously powerful tool for public authorities.” In a written submission, the oganization said, “Its mere existence significantly implicates privacy rights, and its extensive use would represent a dramatic shift in the balance between personal privacy and the capabilities of the state to investigate and analyse the citizen.”

It’s definitely a pretty extreme bill with potentially extreme consequences for British citizens’ privacy. But that’s kind of old hat for the Brits, now, isn’t it? Let’s not forget that the UK is already the most surveilled country in the world.