The Guardian) have questioned as to whether the National Health Service (NHS) really is exempt from austerity measures. In particular, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 caused an increased privatisation of the NHS by 500% in 2014 alone, Paul Evans claims in openDemocracy. By 2014 the Treasury extended the proposed austerity period until at least 2018. Crime and justice Capital punishment Cameron opposes the death penalty, saying that while "There are MPs who think we should restore the death penalty... I don't happen to take that view." Terrorism In 2007, Cameron wrote a piece about his experiences in a national newspaper about his visit with a Muslim family in Birmingham. It turns out he has been leery since before that time of the adjective "Islamist" used to describe the type of terrorism seen in some Muslims: In July 2014, emergency laws were brought in to force phone and internet companies to hold records of customers' calls, texts and visits to websites, purportedly to defend national security against the terrorist threat from Iraq and Syria in light of the civil war in that part of the world. The legislation brought to domestic shores the Five Eyes program revealed in 2012 by former Booz-Allen contractor Edward Snowden, and were a response to a ruling by the European Court of Justice which struck down mere regulations that forced communications companies to retain metadata for police use for 12 months. MI5 investigations had employed this data over the past decade to catch drug dealers, paedophiles and fraudsters and prevent miscarriages of justice. The legislation carries a 2-year sunset clause. ISIL flag A domestic ban on the ISIL flag was promised by David Cameron on 16 August 2014, in the wake of the "onslaught of this exceptionally dangerous terrorist movement"; he went so far as to address the issue with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: The ban promised by Cameron was tested to failure not 11 months afterward, when a man and his daughter were photographed on a summer weekend in broad daylight near Parliament Square mere days after the 2015 Sousse attacks. Hogan-Howe now said carrying the black flag of the terrorist organisation was "not necessarily the worst thing in the world", adding that the police should not overreact, while Boris Johnson, then still the Mayor of London, saw no problem with the terrorist flag in the UK because "we live