Researcher Makes Live Browser History Public to Show Impact of UK’s Surveillance Bill

Since details of the UK’s proposed Investigatory Powers Bill – a law nicknamed the Snooper’s Charter and that aims to open police and intelligence services’ mandate to, amongst other things, access and monitor the internet browser history of any UK citizen – there has been growing concern over the right to privacy of internet users. To illustrate just how intrusive the IP Bill would be, security researcher Brett Lempereur has launched ICREACHAround, a blog which shows a real-time list of websites he has visited.

“This page streams information about the pages I’m visiting on the internet in real-time. A public ICREACH on a really cheap domain name. Some of these links may be NSFW,” Lempereur writes. “This is an attempt to show the amount of information that will be available about you without and with a warrant if the new Investigatory Powers Bill comes into force in its current form.”

ICREACHAround is a play on ICREACH, an NSA search engine that allows US government agencies to navigate through phone records, mobile phone GPS, e-mails, and instant messaging history, the records for which total 850 billion. Lempereur hopes that, by sharing his own browser history, he can demonstrate the personal data that the UK Government would have access to if the surveillance bill is voted into law.

The browser extension that Lempereur uses to gather his own browsing data is available on GitHub if you want to try it for yourself. Lempereur has said that he is happy to field any questions regarding his endeavour via Twitter.