UK deputy leader: Surveillance bill won't happen

[April 25, 2013]  LONDON (AP) -- A mass Internet monitoring program touted by Britain's government as a terror-fighting tool is unworkable, the country's deputy leader said Thursday, vowing that it would not become law.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's opposition means the sweeping surveillance regime -- which would have tracked everything Britons did online -- is likely dead in the water because his Liberal Democrats are the junior partner in Britain's coalition government and have an effective veto over official policy.

"The idea that government will pass a law which means that there'd be a record kept of every website you visit, who you communicate with on social media sites, that's not going happen," Clegg said in comments to London's LBC radio on Thursday. "I'm afraid I think that is not either necessary, workable, nor proportionate, so it's not going to happen."

The proposal would have forced communications service providers to log a huge amount of personal data -- including family phone calls, letters to insurance companies and visits to pornographic websites -- and make it available to law enforcement and other government agencies at the stroke of a key. Officials argued that the proposal was key to helping police, spies, and regulators catch up with advances in online communications, but activists, academics, and libertarians expressed horror at what they dubbed a "snooper's charter."

Julian Huppert, a Liberal Democrat lawmaker, said Clegg's comments meant the surveillance plan was now history.

"It's dead," he said in a message posted to Twitter.

It's not clear that the Home Office saw Clegg's intervention coming. A spokeswoman said she wasn't aware of Clegg's comments when The Associated Press called seeking a response. She later said the Home Office would not be commenting. Cameron's Downing Street office also declined to directly address Clegg's statement, saying that conversations were ongoing.

Civil liberties groups were cheered by the news.

"We're happy!" said Nick Pickles of Big Brother Watch, a U.K. group that campaigns against government surveillance.

In an email, he said the opposition to the proposal from a variety of lawmakers meant Clegg's opposition had likely killed the bill.

But Padraig Reidy of the London-based Index on Censorship warned that the police and intelligence agencies would doubtless be back with new proposals for Internet monitoring and surveillance.

"This is not an issue that will be dropped," he wrote in a blog post.

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Online:

Home Office information on the surveillance proposal: http://bit.ly/15Piesl

[Associated Press; By RAPHAEL SATTER]

Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphae.li/twitter.

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