Sir Tim Berners-Lee recently spoke out against UK government plans to monitor citizen’s internet use, Ian Katz reports. Katz writes, “The government’s controversial plans to allow intelligence agencies to monitor the internet use and digital communications of every person in the UK suffered a fresh blow on Tuesday when the inventor of the world wide web warned that the measures were dangerous and should be dropped. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who serves as an adviser to the government on how to make public data more accessible, says the extension of the state’s surveillance powers would be a ‘destruction of human rights’ and would make a huge amount of highly intimate information vulnerable to theft or release by corrupt officials.”

In an interview, Berners-Lee stated, “The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing… You get to know every detail, you get to know, in a way, more intimate details about their life than any person that they talk to because often people will confide in the internet as they find their way through medical websites … or as an adolescent finds their way through a website about homosexuality, wondering what they are and whether they should talk to people about it.”

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