China passes new mobile phone surveillance law
There's no denying that surveillance is now a very public issue. Over the last couple of years, the ordinary citizens of countless countries around the world have become more engaged with the surveillance laws and practices of their governments, and are starting to take surveillance laws much more seriously.
A by-product of everything that happened with Edward Snowden, and particularly his revealing of the secret surveillance and data sharing practices of the NSA and the UK GCHQ, in recent years we have seen citizens groups, privacy organisations, and civil rights factions take the fight to their governments over surveillance issues.
In the UK and the USA, this fight has recently been directed at new surveillance laws, commonly called snoopers' charters, which would allow the government to work with mobile phone network operators and internet service providers to obtain data on private individuals. In both these countries, there have been major campaigns against the introduction of these new laws, both from corporations and groups representing the general public. However, it still looks as if these laws will be passed in both countries.
Worldwide privacy campaigners have also been dealt another blow in the fight against surveillance this week as China has announced that a new surveillance law, in a similar vein to the snoopers' charter in the UK and CISA in the USA, has been passed through its parliament (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/china-introduces-its-own-snoopers-charter).
This new law will require international internet service providers and mobile telephone network operators to decrypt message content sent and received by their customers if requested to do so by government officials. However, although the passing law has fallen somewhat short of the draft bill that was initially proposed, which suggested that backdoor listening devices be installed to allow the government privileged access to users' data, this new law has still outraged privacy campaigners both in China and around the world.
The Chinese government have defended the bill, stating that it is very similar to the Investigatory Powers Bill, which is currently being passed through parliament by Conservative MPs. How the Chinese public react to this new law, however, we will have to wait and see.