New surveillance laws set to be approved in the UK are “totalitarian” and could cost British lives, security whistleblower William Binney told members of Parliament (MPs) on Wednesday.

Lawmakers are debating the controversial Investigatory Powers Bill, introduced by Home Secretary Theresa May and dubbed the “Snooper’s Charter” by opponents. It is expected to pass later this year and would, among other things, require telecommunications companies to store records of websites visited by every UK citizen for 12 months for access by law enforcement agencies.

That kind of sweeping, invasive surveillance strategy “costs lives, and has cost lives in Britain because it inundates analysts with too much data,” said Binney, who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) for 30 years before exposing the ineffectiveness of its various intelligence programs.

Binney also criticized a UK government surveillance program known as Black Hole, launched in 2008 and made public in 2013 by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which lists everyone in the world who has ever visited a website.

“It is 99 percent useless,” Binney said. “Who wants to know everyone who has ever looked at Google or the BBC?  We have known for decades that that swamps analysts.”

In fact, Binney charged, those kinds of expansive measures prevented intelligence agents from uncovering the September 11 plot, as the deluge of information strained resources within the NSA and impeded its ability to investigate leads.