Acclaimed author Evgeny Morozov is in London promoting the new edition of his book, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. It argues that internet freedom is an illusion and that everyone’s freedom is at stake. It is timely, then, that his trip has coincided with the web surveillance row that has been shaking the coalition. Morozov met with the Spectator this afternoon, and this is what he said about ‘email snooping’:
DB: With email snooping, I’d assumed that the security services did that already?
EM: They do it already, but they do it retroactively. So they can get the information out, which is what they call communications data, which is basically email addresses and the times that you sent them and who you sent them to. To get that, they need don’t need to get a warrant, [but] they need to file a request and wait a week, months, however long it takes for the technology companies to send it.
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