In February, then-UK Home Secretary May pushed forward a revised Investigatory Powers Bill to parliament that seeks to extend police powers to browse people’s web history and hack phones whenever they deem it necessary. She argued that the revised bill had stronger privacy protections and oversight arrangements, as well as a strict requirement that police obtain a senior judge’s permission before accessing communications data, for instance to identify a journalist’s source.
Snowden told The Guardian newspaper that Theresa May is a “a sort of Darth Vader in the United Kingdom”, whose surveillance bill is “an egregious violation of human rights, that goes far further than any law proposed in the western world.”
In the United States, Snowden faces up to 30 years in prison on charges of espionage and theft of government property.
