UK Data Retention Snooping Law Thrown Out One Year Later

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about how the UK Parliament rushed through a dangerous data retention bill, known as the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill, or DRIP, with little debate. As soon as it became law, challenges were filed -- and now the UK's High Court has struck down the law. As you may also recall, the rush to pass DRIP was in response to an EU Court of Justice ruling that said widespread data retention violated privacy rules. And, rather than take the hint, the UK government used it as an excuse to try to just rewrite the rules to let them continue snooping on the public.

Not surprisingly, the current UK government (which has been looking to expand its snooping powers rather than limit them) has made it clear that it will appeal this ruling. Furthermore, the court is allowing the government until early next year to see if it can fix the law by itself:

The judges said that the first section of Dripa "does not lay down clear and precise rules providing for access to and use of communications data" and should be "disapplied".

But the judges said their order on disapplication should be suspended until after March 31 2016 "to give Parliament the opportunity to put matters right".

That's an interesting way of going about things: we see you've been violating the rights of the public for a year now, and so we'll give you another 9 months to do so and hope that during that time you'll figure out a way to maybe not violate the public's rights so much.

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