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Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms . . . . I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on.1
Introduction
Think of every website you have visited in the last week, or month, or year. Think about the countless emails and text messages you have sent and the number of phone calls you have made. Now imagine that the government has access to the metadata of all of these communications-all the information except the actual content.2 If this does not frighten you, consider the statement of the former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Director, Michael Hayden: "We kill people based on metadata."3
Hayden made this statement approximately one year after Edward Snowden's early revelations about the intelligence policies of both the United States and the United Kingdom.4 Snowden described the U.K.'s system as even "more intrusive to people's privacy than has been seen in the US."5 One of his numerous leaks revealed that the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) not only secretly collected and stored emails, Facebook posts, Internet records, and call histories of individuals- irrespective of whether they had ties to crime or terrorism-but that GCHQ also shared such information with the NSA.6
Shortly after Snowden's revelations, both the United States and United Kingdom justified their respective surveillance policies on public safety grounds.7 However, while the United States backtracked on this stance in 2015 when President Barack Obama signed the Freedom Act into law,8 the United Kingdom continued to defend its surveillance practices and marched towards a new expansive surveillance law-the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IP Act).9 Prime Minister Theresa May provided a simple justification for the IP Act. She stated, "[i]f you are searching for the needle in the haystack, you have to have a haystack in the first place."10
The IP Act became official law after it received the Queen's royal assent11 on November 29, 2016.12 Since then, critics and supporters of the IP Act have articulated viewpoints that are in diametric opposition to one another.13 Dr. Julian Huppert, a former Member of Parliament (MP),...