I urge you to work to ensure that the following principles are
respected in a revision of the Investigatory Powers bill, which
was introduced in draft yesterday by Theresa May:

1. All instances of surveillance - whether they involve intercepting
transmissions or actually accessing a surveillance target's own
computer or other device - must have prior (or in rare and extreme
emergency circumstances, very prompt post hoc) authorisation from a
judge.	There currently is discussion as to whether the legislation
ought to permit police access to records of web sites visited without
any requirement for judicial authorisation.  All that it would take to
abuse such an unchecked system would be one prejudiced or unfairly
biased police official - just one, in the entire country.

2. Surveillance requests, and actual surveillance, must target an
individual or well defined group of individuals, not an entire
community and certainly not the entire country.  Retention and human
inspection of communications en masse is inconsistent with life in a
free state.

3. Internet service providers must not be compelled to retain more data
about their customers, including the proposed one-year record of web
sites visited.	European and Commonwealth countries do not compel
service providers to retain such pen registers, and Australia recently
passed legislation prohibiting this practice.  The nearly weekly
drumbeat of security breaches show that any data that are retained can
be subject to unauthorised access and release.	Do we really want to
place Britain in the company of states such as Russia which mandate
such logging and retention?

4. Explicit protections must be articulated in law for lawyer-client
communications, journalists' (including independent journalists')
sources, legislators' correspondence, and all other categories of
communications whose disclosure to the government or to the police
could threaten democratic freedoms.

5. Mechanisms for redress must exist and must be readily accessible to
those targeted by surveillance, and individuals who have been under
surveillance must be promptly notified of the existence and extent of
that surveillance as soon as it concludes.  Surveillance must be
concluded whenever there no longer are reasonable grounds for suspicion
of the target(s) of the surveillance.

6. Standards and technologies of encryption available to the public
must not be limited.  These tools would in any case be available to
persons willing to break the law to obtain them, as Parliament cannot
hope to eradicate them worldwide.  Given this reality, then, encryption
tools ought to be as available to law-abiding persons as they are to
outlaws.