The next prime minister will decide if Britain continues a damaging race to the bottom on internet freedom

As the battle for Conservative Party leadership draws to a close, the future of online privacy, free speech and security in the UK is at a pinch point. Steadily and implacably, the British government is moving to roll out some of the most ambitious internet regulations in the Western world, with far-reaching implications for our democratic freedoms.

Will our next prime minister continue to curtail our digital rights, or can parliament and our democracy fight back?

The UK already has one of the most sweeping and intrusive state surveillance regimes in the Western democratic world. The Investigatory Powers Act (dubbed a “Snooper’s Charter” by activists) goes further than any country bar China or Russia in allowing the government to collect and monitor its citizens’ internet browsing history.

Not content with this, No 10 has proposed installing backdoor government access into messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, and called for a blanket ban on end-to-end encryption.

The UK’s surveillance regime continues to be challenged in the courts – both in the UK and at European level. This is why on Saturday 13 July, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is making a rare public appearance via video-link at the Open Rights Group annual conference, ORGCon 2019.

He will be sharing his expert view on government surveillance worldwide and discussing what the future holds as the UK and other democratic Western states build tools to monitor citizens on a mass scale.

Snowden’s revelations continue to reverberate, yet the UK government is pushing forward with wide-sweeping internet regulations that could trample all over our fundamental rights. Proposals to address "online harms" through a content-based approach to regulation, and to cover a breathtaking range of companies and services, will fail to establish any solid evidence of harm and rely on a conceptually disastrous "duty of care" model which risks censoring the speech of millions of British citizens.

The government's stated ambition is to be world-leading. If they don't heed our advice to rethink, though, their "flexible" approach will simply pave the way for authoritarian governments to implement even more oppressive and censorious laws and regimes.

The digital world is expanding and upgrading at an incredible rate. We’re seeing an explosion in the sophistication of technological tools, and a huge uptake in artificial intelligence and big data analytics.

The internet of things and facial recognition technology are likely to transform life as we know it. The government and public agencies are keen to harness the power of data and algorithms in all sectors, from criminal justice and counter-terrorism, to immigration and health.

Suddenly, everyone is talking about tech and "ethics". But even though this is a generally positive step forward, often missing in the excitement of innovation and discussions about "responsible progress" is the language of human rights.

Rights exist in international law as established, objective limits, and should be more explicitly used by policymakers, particularly in government, as they develop digital frameworks. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights need to be made directly enforceable in UK law, so that corporate giants can be held accountable for the ways their decisions and actions affect ordinary people.

The cult dystopian TV series “Black Mirror” pitch-perfectly captures the zeitgeist of ambivalence about the potentially profound long-run implications of these increasingly pervasive technologies. At our conference, we’ll be confronting this cultural unease head-on by exploring a vaguely-worded exemption in the UK Data Protection Act 2018 which allows the Home Office to deny people access to their personal data on the basis of immigration control.

Then there’s Google’s secret "Dragonfly" programme of a censored search engine for China; shady practices of electoral manipulation; and vast data breaches in the advertising technology industry – and that’s not even the half of it.

The aftershocks of the Cambridge Analytica scandal are still rumbling through our public sphere. Political use of profiling and targeting techniques to win votes and gain power is one of the most troubling issues of our age. “Dark money,” fake news and a lack of transparency in social media campaigns increase the risk of foreign interference in elections and undermine trust and integrity in the democratic process.

Greater transparency over personal data use and more nuanced approaches to election spending regulations are key to ensuring accountability of political parties in their campaigning practices.

Accountability vitally needs to run through all layers of politics. Once the Conservative Party’s leadership choice is made, it will be Johnson or Hunt that makes the ultimate decisions about what comes next. It seems almost inevitable that they will take us into Brexit, and in leaving the EU, the UK could deviate from European privacy protections and put British citizens at risk of even more surveillance, and even less privacy and freedom of expression.

It is crucial that our next prime minister doesn’t pursue a renewed race to the bottom on digital freedoms. They must instead act to protect our hard-won freedoms, and ensure that justice and equality are the rock on which Britain’s future is built.

Amy Shepherd is Legal and Policy Officer at Open Rights Group.