Apple Takes Issue With UK’s Draft Surveillance Bill

The tech giant submitted a formal objection to the draft version of the U.K. government’s new Investigatory Powers Bill, which, if passed into law, will establish a new set of surveillance powers and allow security and intelligence agencies to have greater insight into the websites visited by Internet users.

Home Secretary Theresa May introduced the bill to Parliament last month and Apple responded to the British Parliamentary Scrutiny Committee on Monday (Dec. 21) with an eight-page submission that explained how the bill threatens the privacy of “the personal data of millions of law-abiding citizens,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

“The creation of back doors and intercept capabilities would weaken the protections built into Apple products and endanger all our customers,” Apple said. “A key left under the doormat would not just be there for the good guys. The bad guys would find it too.”

People close to the matter told the Financial Times that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft are also expected to submit evidence to the committee while it continued to review the proposed bill.

The U.K.’s move to enact unprecedented access to other countries’ data for its law-enforcement and national-security officials could “immobilize substantial portions of the tech sector and spark serious international conflicts,” Apple stated.

“It would also likely be the catalyst for other countries to enact similar laws, paralyzing multinational corporations under the weight of what could be dozens or hundreds of contradictory country-specific laws,” the company continued.

With the Investigatory Powers Bill in place, the U.K. government will have the authority to require U.K. ISPs to keep a running log of all digital activities and the information gathered from them. This could include everything from media consumption habits and banking activity, to health concerns and political affiliations.

The U.K. government has made it clear its intention with the Investigatory Powers Bill is to plug what it considered to be “capability gaps” in the intelligence gathering abilities of its law enforcement and security agencies, but many critics see the push for mass surveillance as a threat to the privacy protections of individuals.