How Theresa May's Fight Against Extremism Is Screwing with Online Privacy

Image courtesy of Foreign and Commonwealth Office via Flickr.

The year is… Next year. Theresa May is still in power. In fact, she's even more powerful than ever. She managed to consolidate her power into a kind of evil Tory dictatorship, and everyone just sort of lets it happen. She got Corbyn bumped off in a forest David Kelly style, Diane Abbott car bombed and John McDonnell went the way of "Big Pussy" from Sopranos (wrapped in a carpet and chains and walloped into the sea (bit of a spoiler there but if you haven't watched it by now then you only have yourself to blame). She sits in Downing Street with a crown made of icy stalagmites and a vantablack powersuit. Her chair is placed in front of a swirling purple vortex, out of which various dripping tentacles and faceless green souls weave in and out of. The souls scream at the void, but it doesn't scream back. She wears knuckle dusters made of melted Nazi gold. At her feet lies a three-headed hound. It's dead.

Only joking. Theresa May isn't going to murder the opposition and, using the power gained from bathing in their blood whilst eating a lit candle and chanting "GARK MALAK!" over again, isn't going to become Be'elzebub's bride. She will probably still be prime minister next year though, and according to the jumbled cataclysm that was the Tory manifesto, and recent comments in the wake of the Finsbury Park terrorist attack and all the other terrorist attacks, has some things to say about the internet.

This is nothing new with the Tories. David Cameron (remember that pig fucker?) instilled his big, bad porn filter on all of us in 2014, but to be honest it hasn't made much of a difference. They also were asking big questions of BlackBerry after the riots because people were talking on BBM about, I dunno, nicking bottles of Paco Rabanne or whatever. But lately May has decided that the internet is going to be her biggest opponent in her giant battle against Absolutely Everyone. But what does it really mean for you, the consumer, the internet lover? What does May's dystopian net-prison future look like? Let's escape down that particular rabbit hole and see what the maligned leader of the fifth largest economy wants to do with your freedom! Wheeeeee!

"We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm," says the Tory manifesto. The implication here is that your Google searches might not lead you to the place you want them to. By controlling what results can come up when certain things are searched, May hopes to deter people from being radicalised (and wanking, it seems). The logic here is that most people are probably not Googling "how to be a banging terrorist" or "reasons why the west is a bunch of kuffars" or "where I can get me a shotgun to try and start my unbridled race war". You might just be searching 'where can I get 5 tonnes of bleach' for your cleaning company and end up in Guantanamo Bay. Stranger things have happened.

They certainly don't Google their porn preferences, it's not Amazon where you want to peruse the sites before you click on one you like. You just go to the homepage of your favourite grotty superhighway and see what horrible cousin fucking scene has been uploaded so you can spray your beans all over your belly button before you fall asleep with your hand glued to you penis, which hides deeper into your fist as the blood from it re-joins the rest of you. Theresa May wants to stop you waking up with your snail trail all stuck together. Fair fucks.

As part of May's crackdown on terrorism, she would quite like the ability to give ministers access to your WhatsApps on request. Not only that, but she wants more of course. They want to block and block and keep blocking – even though their overzealous blocking can result in young people not being able to access sexual health information or even suicide prevention. And, as usual, death and destruction is being used as an excuse to relinquish of you to have a semblance of privacy. Every idle chat you have is open for the government to poke their long nose in.

She claims she wants the UK to be the "global leader" in internet regulation, which is a little like being the world leader in CCTV (which we are, second now only to Beijing). The problem is, as writer Alex Lee points out in an article for the Guardian, forcing us to give away our data through back-doors built into apps opens everyone who doesn't have a belt of dynamite or one-way van trip to make susceptible to hacking – not only us normies but the government too. "It is not safe when people are involuntarily forced to give away our data through backdoors into applications that are supposed to be encrypted. This will only serve to make us and our data more unsafe. We will be opening ourselves up to opportunistic criminals."

At least her and the rest of the cabinet will be able to see the great gag you made in The Bant Cave, the WhatsApp group you have with your halls mates that's gone quiet now everyone's left and realised they don't like each other.

The problem with old people, especially those in power, is that they think "action" and "doing things", regardless of what they are, is a valuable exertion because it showcases the kind of stability this government purports to be in possession of. Unfortunately removing the securities that are in place for a reason, to protect our data and our privacy, if such a thing even still exists, is what's on the agenda for old people in power. Does Theresa May have a computer? If so, when does she use it? Is she sat up in bed with the humming glow of an iPad screen illuminating her scissor-like face, shining through her stressed hair? Could all this just be a desperate revenge ploy on the trolls et haters? How does one tackle cyber crime yet simultaneously enable it? I'll tell you how: badly, and with great difficulty and confusion. Back to the hell mouth to ride Cthulu across the river Styx for old Terry May methinks.

@joe_bish

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