Parliamentary committee to question May over Investigatory Powers Bill

MPs and peers are set to question Home Secretary Theresa May on the privacy implications of the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill. The proposed Bill has faced strong criticism from major companies including Facebook, Google and Twitter, who have warned that demands to access confidential data and weaken encryption could have serious privacy implications for the British public. May will appear before the Bill’s parliamentary scrutiny committee on 13 January to answer questions on all aspects of the Bill including communications data, internet connection records, data retention, authorisation and oversight. Questions put to the Home Secretary will likely include: whether the value of he communications data to be stored for 12 months and accessed by the police and security services outweighs the privacy risks involved; why the Bill’s current definition of telecommunications providers potentially includes coffee shop and hotel Wi-Fi providers; how she justifies bulk data collection as legal given recent judgments in the EU court of justice and the European court of human rights; and why the draft Bill weakens the protection given to journalistic sources under existing and crime and terrorism legislation.