NSA Whistleblower: Mass Surveillance in UK Espionage Act Will Cost Lives

According to William Binney, former NSA employee and whistleblower, the British government is not getting anywhere with the planned mass surveillance in the proposal for a new espionage law. Due to an abundance of data, security services would no longer know which information is important.

Binney spent more than 30 years in senior positions for the NSA until 2001, sounding the alarm about the squandering of millions of dollars by the security service. He is addressing a British government committee today that should examine the proposal for the new Espionage Act. According to Binney, collecting communications data in bulk is “99 percent useless” because it floods intelligence analysts with data, writes The Guardian.

Binney goes on to say that this could actually make British citizens more vulnerable to terrorist attacks and therefore the proposed legislation ‘will cost lives’. He is particularly critical of the so-called Black Hole programme, where the British GCHQ has been keeping a list of everyone who has ever visited a website since 2008. According to him, such practices are ‘befitting a totalitarian state’ and he therefore proposes to rewrite the bill.

The bill of the Investigatory Powers Bill includes powers for the government to store data about websites visited by citizens for 12 months and to hack computers and telephones due to equipment interference. Initially, it was feared that the proposal would also include a ban on encryption, but this was not confirmed.