Earlier this week, we wrote about the UK‘s release of its new Snooper‘s Charter bill, where we noted that the government spin on it was fairly dizzying. I noted at the time that while the government kept insisting that it wasn‘t adding a requirement to backdoor encryption, that was misleading because the text of the bill indicated the government believed such a mandate already existed. And that‘s only the least of it. The bill and the discussion around it simply confirmed that the UK government engaged in mass surveillance for many, many years, and until now only a „tiny handful“ of government ministers even knew about it.