A blockchain infrastructure firm is quitting the UK in protest at the reappearance of the Snooper’s Charter after the general election.
Eris Industries will move its headquarters to New York and advise its staff to leave the UK until the effect of the Investigatory Powers Bill being advanced by the newly elected Conservative government becomes clear.
Writing online, Preston Byrne, COO and general counsel at Eris, dismissed the extra snooping powers – which have yet to be outlined in full – as "completely unnecessary" and "justified by statistics which have little basis in fact".
"If there were any indication that the terrorists in the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, which precipitated the government’s first attempt to introduce this bill this year, or indeed those in 9/11, had used encryption to carry out their attacks, which they did not, maybe we would agree with the government’s proposals," he said.
"The fact is, however, that cryptography overwhelmingly protects legal businesses and ordinary people, not criminals and terrorists, from harm."
The Snooper’s Charter was originally mooted by home secretary Theresa May during the last parliament as the Communications Data Bill, but was scuppered by the Conservatives’ junior coalition partners the Liberal Democrats.
The bill was one of the first to be put back on the table after the surprise Conservative victory in the polls in early May, which has given them a slender majority with which to enact legislation in the House of Commons.
Speaking to the BBC shortly after the general election, May said: "[The prime minister] David Cameron has already said, and I’ve said, that a Conservative government would be giving the security agencies and law enforcement agencies the powers that they need to ensure they’re keeping up to date as people communicate with communications data.
"We are determined to bring that through, because we believe that is necessary to maintain the capabilities for our law enforcement agencies such that they can continue to do the excellent job, day in and day out, of keeping us safe and secure."
Eris’s departure from to the US, where Byrne claims the company’s open source cryptography will be protected under the free speech clause in the US constitution, comes just as the Senate failed to secure an extension to the NSA’s phone metadata collection scheme.
However it is widely believed that a newly introduced bill called the Freedom Act will reauthorise much of the programme, having the backing of much of the Senate and the US president Barack Obama.
