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Hello and welcome to Marshall Matters, me, Winston Marshall at the Spectator.

The online safety bill is about to pass its third reading

at the House of Lords. And at the 11th hour, Lord Peers have tried to put in measures that will

mean tech companies like WhatsApp will have to give over encrypted messaging. And at the same time,

the Digital Services Act is passing through in the EU.

And all the while, facial recognition is coming up.

And we've just seen that the Home Office are being lobbying for facial recognition spy companies in the UK.

And here to discuss all that.

And a lot more is the director of Big Brother Watch,

Silky Carlo.

Silky, thank you so much for coming to speak with me.

Thanks for having me.

So I am hoping to get an education in some of these things aforementioned.

But I wondered if we could start, if you don't mind telling me and listeners and viewers a little bit about your work at Big Brother Watch

and how you came to be interested in this world of surveillance and free speech issues.

Well, Big Brother Watch is a UK Privacy and Civil Liberties campaign organisation.

We're non-profit, non-partisan.

We work particularly at the intersection of technology and human rights, which is where we see an enormous increase in surveillance and

now increasingly censorship. So we are tasked with trying to be part of civil society that

helps to defend our liberal traditions

and that advances civil liberties in a time where technology makes suppressing them very much

...