If the UK government collects browsing data, one day it will be public

[Commentary] Nov 4, the UK home secretary Theresa May unveiled the Investigatory Powers Bill: a piece of draft legislation that entails the bulk collection of online data by spy agencies and forces Internet companies to keep a record of every UK citizen's browsing history for a year. The first point is brazen -- enshrining the hidden surveillance state that Edward Snowden first revealed -- but the second is witless. If we've learned anything about computer security in the last decade it's that there is none. Computers are hacked, data is stolen, and if the UK government forces Internet service providers to collect browsing histories in this way, it's only a matter of time before the information is public. This isn't an exaggeration: neither corporate nor government data is safe. Just this week, the UK's Crown Prosecution Service was fined for losing laptops containing video interviews with criminal suspects, and in the past the government has lost an almost comical amount of data, ranging from information about prison staff and patients, to the safety assessment for a nuclear power plant left on an unencrypted USB stick.