Looking back at 2014 from the perspective of a surveillance reformer is a short and dispiriting task: almost nothing good happened.
The UK passed “emergency” legislation, referred to as the Drip Act, expanding mass surveillance powers in the wake of European court judgments. In the US, modest reforms to domestic mass surveillance failed to pass Congress. Ireland retrospectively made legal UK mass surveillance efforts related to the country, while even Germany – one of the most outspoken nations on surveillance – has challenged Der Spiegel’s reporting of the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone.
On surveillance, 2014 was the year the administration struck back. But while the Conservative party in the UK has made it clear it would like to further extend surveillance powers, both sides of the Atlantic might find next year a closer fight than they would think. Two key pieces of legislation authorising surveillance are coming up for renewal. Most important is the Patriot Act, which must be renewed by 1 June, or else go out of force – taking with it the NSA’s collection of US phone details.
In the UK, the major parties have pledged to re-examine the critical Ripa legislation, which authorises most UK mass-surveillance programmes, after the election – and have to renew the Drip legislation by the end of 2016. The other key place to watch will be the courts: there are multiple challenges in UK tribunals, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European court of justice, and several cases attempting to get the US supreme court to make its first surveillance rulings since Edward Snowden’s leaks.
The technological backdrop is similarly mixed: in the immediate wake of Snowden, a flurry of new companies promising privacy arose, but there’s not yet a definitive app, while incumbents such as Tor have revealed several attacks and security breaches (since fixed). Conversely, though, major players are starting to regard privacy as a selling point: Google and others are encrypting ever more of their traffic, and even enhancing privacy controls over which information the search and social giants store.
So it’s all to play for in the year ahead. Against a backdrop of high-profile hacks and terror attacks in western cities, it’s conceivable that surveillance powers will be strengthened. But the post-Snowden reform movement still has momentum, and there’s every chance that documents from Snowden or some other whistleblower could influence the debate in 2015.
