‘It’s the hottest trend in spooking: Take law-abiding citizens, usually business owners, and use the justice system to compel them into being your enthusiastic deputies. People pitch in by opening their doors, both physically and digitally, so the government can make use of any supposedly private user data they might have. The seeming enthusiasm of the collaboration comes from the fact that these same orders make it a crime to reveal the collaboration, so service providers must also actively deceive their own users about the true level of privacy they provide.
Now the UK is getting in on the action, as it’s been revealed that under the upcoming Investigatory Powers Bill it will have the ability to order companies to build software“backdoors” into their products, and revealing that collaboration could result in up to a year in prison. More than that, the government is also empowering itself to enlist the services of talented individuals like hackers, and to also legally restrain these people from revealing the work they’ve done — even in open court. In the US, these orders are called as National Security Letters (NSLs), and they have come to be routinely served to everyone from a small business owners to major corporate executives.’
Read more: UK law mandates software backdoors and jail for disclosing vulnerability
