Cyberleagle: The Investigatory Powers Act - swan or turkey?: "Over 300 pages make up what then Prime Minister David Cameron described as the most important Bill of the last Parliament. When it comes into force the IP Act will replace much of RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000), described by David Anderson Q.C.’s report A Question of Trust as ‘incomprehensible to all but a tiny band of initiates’. It will also supersede a batch of non-RIPA powers that had been exercised in secret over many years - some, so the Investigatory Powers Tribunal has found, on the basis of an insufficiently clear legal framework.
None of this would have occurred but for the 2013 Snowden revelations of the scale of GCHQ’s use of bulk interception powers. Two years post-Snowden the government was still acknowledging previously unknown (except to those in the know) uses of opaque statutory powers.
Three Reviews and several Parliamentary Committees later, it remains a matter of opinion whether the thousands of hours of labour that went into the Act have brought forth a swan or a turkey. If the lengthy incubation has produced a swan, it is one whose feathers are already looking distinctly ruffled following the CJEU judgment in Watson/Tele2, issued three weeks after Royal Assent. That decision will at a minimum require the data retention aspects of the Act to be substantially amended. " 'via Blog this'
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