Despite government claims that the Online Safety Bill will not include a ‘backdoor’ for breaking encryption, contrary to reports, there have been no amendments to the Bill that would stop the Home Office snooping on private messages. Here’s where we stand as the bill looks to return to parliament:
Speaking on the latest evidence, David Davis told Guido:
“The Government has acted with the best of intentions but this Bill is going to have a litany of unintended consequences. Conceding that interception at source of private communications – and effective undermining of encryption – won’t happen until ‘technically feasible’ is an improvement on rushing blindly into a disastrous policy, but it is still just kicking the problem down the road. We need to be clear on a variety of issues thrown up by this latest stance. Will, for example, Parliament be consulted at the point that a technically feasible option is judged to be available? If not, who will assess whether the option is safe enough?
“Too many ministers and numerous changes of direction has resulted in a piece of legislation that will have significant unintended consequences for this country.
“We have a duty to uphold our rights to privacy and freedom of expression. Proper consideration must be given to how both the Online Safety Bill and the Investigatory Powers Act operate together, and what the real effect of these two complex pieces of legislation are on the rights of the British people.”
Westminster’s worried about Chinese spies, perhaps we should also be looking a little closer to home…
UPDATE: The government made a last-minute amendment in the Lords to include new powers for Ofcom to “remotely view” information. This was not consulted about publicly. Ofcom has a history of being victim to cyberattacks…
Lord Parkinson gave verbal assurances that powers to require scanning of private messages would not be used until technically feasible in the Lords yesterday. There are no words to that effect in the Bill…
Sixty eight leading computer science academics have signed an open letter raising serious concerns of the government’s proposed Online Safety Bill. The letter argues the bill allows “surveillance technology to be deployed in the spirit of preserving online safety”. They add “this act undermines privacy guarantees and, indeed, safety online”
Specifically, the boffins are concerned with the proposal to enable the “routine monitoring” of communications – even with the noble intention of preventing the dissemination of child sexual exploitation content. They argue this monitoring is “incompatible” with maintaining the protocols which offer privacy guarantees and say any attempts to sidestep these protocols are “doomed to fail”. The signatories, including 36 UK university professors, finish by saying the safety provided by essential technologies “are now under threat in the Online Safety Bill”. They could at least scrap the EU cookie law to make up for it…
Read the letter in full below:
With the Online Safety Bill is back in parliament next week, Conservative rebels have picked an amendment to give Ofcom the powers prosecute social media executives – with jail time as a possible sentence – as their latest battle. When the amendment was put to Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan by the BBC’s Newscast, she said she was “not ruling out” any changes, adding she would take a “sensible approach”. Considering Labour and 36 Conservative MPs are backing the amendment, it’s not like she had much of a choice in the matter…
We then got a glimpse of what the bill might mean for debate on the internet. When asked whether Andrew Bridgen’s recent tweet – which Donelan implied was antisemitic – would be allowed, she responded:
“There is a triple shield of protection for adults under the bill now, so if it strays into illegal, which we know a lot of antisemitism can stray into, then it would go. If it is a breach of their terms and conditions, which all of the major platforms have antisemitism as a breach of terms and conditions, so it should have gone. The problem we’ve got at the moment is these platforms they play loose with their terms and conditions”
To paraphrase, the bill leaves it to Silicon Valley to decide which opinions are acceptable.
Guido treads warily here. MPs and clerks have been at this Bill for five years with several secretaries of state and governments galore. Last week, its 243 pages were at Report stage – actually heading to the floor of the House with a number of sinister clauses in it – when Secretary of State Michelle Donelan ordered it back into committee for surgery. All provisions curtailing the idea of “legal but harmful” speech or “lawful but awful” communications were to be cut out from the Bill.
Has that happened? Has it been cleaned up, cleaned out, cleaned?
On Minister Scully’s account, it wasn’t clear to the back of the room. As a text-to-speech device, Paul Scully will benefit from an upgrade. The urgent monotone, the quick-fire of drafting terms – it’s not easy to keep up for those who haven’t been toiling in this particular vineyard as long as he.
However, the Oppositions gave clarity. On the account of the SNP’s Kirsty Blackman and Labour’s Charlotte Nichols, it is now a completely different Bill: “It is not an online safety Bill, it is a child protection Bill.”
That sounded quite good. Ah, but no. The Bill now failed to create a safe internet. And safety was paramount.
Minister Michelle Donelan made her debut appearance in front of the DCMS select committee and received a warm welcome in the form of a pleased-to-meet-you battering from the chair, Julian Knight. Perhaps he was exasperated, perhaps he’s had enough of ministers, perhaps the Audit Office report on a DCMS fiasco was the last straw. He bunched his knuckles, put out a finger and piled in.
£120 million of public money had been spent on the inexplicable and unpardonable nonsense of Unboxed, the rebranded Festival of Brexit. People remember WW1 Remembrance, he said. They remember the 2010 Olympics. They remember the Queen’s Jubilee. But Unboxed? People had barely heard of it, and its “engagement” figures were lamentable.
He very nearly asked her to apologise for it. But he had much else with which to chastise her.
The minister had gone into hedgehog mode. She was defensive. She was covering for officials. She hadn’t learned any lessons. We couldn’t afford it then and certainly couldn’t now. She wouldn’t tell us who the officials were who designed the mess of it. She implied that her critics didn’t understand what they were talking about. She hadn’t listened to the Committee who’d said all along it was going to be a disaster because it had no idea behind it.
The Online Safety Bill is coming back for its Report stage on Monday. Secretary of State Michelle Donelan said again in DCMS questions this morning that she has removed the “legal but harmful” clause and protected free speech. Online-harm activists don’t like it one little bit, though free-speech enthusiasts should take no comfort from that. The Bill puts into legal jeopardy anything that creates “a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of adults in the United Kingdom”.
Significant harm? What constitutes “significant harm”? Precedent tells us “harm” is very much in the heart of the beholder.
Say that a private citizen posts:
Biological sex trumps gender ID. Transwomen are transwomen – not actual women.
And an activist reports the post to Ofcom – or to the publishing platform, or to the court, in a private prosecution – saying,
This hateful speech has damaged the core of my identity. It has attempted to erase my very being. I feel not just disparaged but annihilated. Half of all trans children who are denied will attempt suicide. I am now in danger of killing myself.
How can that not be interpreted as “significant harm”? The question is – under this Bill, will Kathleen Stock (the university lecturer hounded from her job by woke activists) be able to question gender ideology on social media?
Reading the Bill, Guido suggests she will not. Activists will claim harm. And even if Ofcom prevaricates, the owner of the platform will fear for being fined 10% of its worldwide income. It will censor the posts of private citizens and all posts like it “to prevent harm”. So – that’s the Stock question. It needs more than a stock answer.
UPDATE: The reservations expressed in Guido’s items on this subject were the result of reading the Bill as published on the internet. The Secretary of State’s version relies on consolidating her proposed Amendments with the text of the Bill – something that won’t happen until the relevant amendments have been passed, we all assume, on Monday.
Secretary of State Donelan has been in touch to say that her Amendment striking out Clause 151 removes the vestiges of “legal but harmful” from the Bill. The text of the Bill – still posted on the internet – says that an offence would be committed if anyone sent a message that risked causing “harm” to “a likely audience”. With Monday’s amendment, 151 is omitted and there will be no grounds in it for activists to pursue minority opinion-holders in the courts or through any administrative processes in Ofcom.
