| 4th February |
Labour's Listening... |
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State spying in Britain that would make the Stasi proud
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Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000)
See
full article from the Daily Mail
by Edward Heathcoat Amory
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 When
it was passed into law, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
(2000) sounded a pretty innocuous piece of legislation. But in truth it
represented a significant victory for the busybody state over our
ancient liberties.
Labour claimed it was responding to demands from civil liberties
campaigners for more control over state snooping. But it soon became
clear that the legislation which Jack Straw, then Home Secretary, was
introducing would have the opposite effect, massively expanding the
ability of the public sector to pry into our private lives.
The Act, which has been quietly amended several times (each time handing
more powers to the public sector), now gives an unprecedented range of
state agencies the right to listen to our phone conversations, tap our
emails and open our post. In the last nine months of 2006, 960 new
applications for the right to peer into the private lives of Britons
were made every day.
It is a level of Government surveillance that would make even the Stasi,
the former East German secret police renowned as the world's most
effective intelligence agency, proud.
There are three different types of surveillance:
- Interception of Communications -
listening in while people are on the phone, or watching what we do on
the internet - is the most difficult to justify.
But the grounds for interception are so wide as to allow most requests
to be approved. As well as the more predictable excuse of national
security, they include safeguarding the economic well-being of
the UK. The police, the security services and Customs can all use
this technique but they need authorisation from the Home Secretary
herself or, in urgent cases, get temporary permission from one of her
senior officials.
- Surveillance - old-fashioned spying.
The list of possible justifications for this is absurdly long -
including to prevent and detect crime or prevent disorder, public
safety, public health, to assess or collect any tax, duty, levy or
other charge payable to a government department. Just about any of
us could be under surveillance using one of this list.
Most worryingly, a long list of government agencies - including 474
councils - can put us under the spotlight. Senior officials in each
one can simply give the go-ahead and apply for a rubber stamp to be
given later by the Interception Commissioner.
This Commissioner, former judge Sir Paul Kennedy, with a team of five
inspectors, is supposed to check to make sure that all the bugging and
spying waived through by the Home Secretary or others has been
justified. His report this week identifies more than 1,000 cases over
nine months where he found that the rules had been broken.
- Access to communications data. This
type of surveillance is the most common and includes discovering the
identities of who we phone and which internet sites we visit. This
information is even easier for public authorities to obtain with
relatively junior officials able to authorise it.
Later, as in the case of surveillance, justification for needing this
information is considered by overworked bureaucrats accountable to the
Interception Commissioner.
But by the time his staff gets round to looking at the paperwork, the
trading standards officers down at the town hall, for example, may
have been peering at your phone and internet records for more than a
year.
There is a tribunal to which you can complain, but since virtually no
one under surveillance will know they are being watched, the tribunal
isn't busy and has virtually never found in favour of a complainant.
How did the Government get away with this? Well, the Lords did make a
fuss at the time. Tory peer Lord Northesk said it sanctioned mass
domestic surveillance measures.
The Government appeared to be forced into a climbdown. The Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) initially only covered the nine most
crucial law enforcement agencies (police, the taxman, the intelligence
agencies etc).
But this merely delayed the stealthy march of Big Brother. In 2004, the
number of groups with the right to poke in our lives expanded to 792;
the laws to allow this had been slipped quietly through the Commons by
David Blunkett.
As usual, Whitehall got its way by waiting for the fuss to die down.
Incidentally, the only group with an exemption from being bugged are MPs
themselves.
But the Act didn't merely extend the rights of bureaucrats to check on
us, it also forced the larger internet service providers to build into
their systems the technological capability to cater for all this
snooping.
In practice, the result was that "black boxes" were installed in all
main ISPs, copying all the information available to them straight to the
security services. Then, when MI5 or the police obtain an authorisation
for surveillance, they merely tap into the black box. In return, the
internet companies have been able to recoup some of their costs from the
taxpayer.
While writing this article, I made several phone calls and looked at a
number of sources on the internet. If anyone in Whitehall can think of a
plausible reason why this article threatens the economic security of
Britain, or any of the myriad excuses detailed above, they will be able
this morning to see who I spoke to and where I went on the net, to
conduct my research. Surely, that can't be right?
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