UK Parliament Watch

Tuesday saw the first debate of the Investigatory Powers Bill in the House of Commons.

The debate raised some useful arguments, but many speeches avoided the key point: that the Bill would bring in a huge, unparalleled extension of surveillance powers that had never been debated by MPs before.

The Open Rights Group, ORG, will be proposing amendments to change the Bill. It's unfit for purpose at the moment, permitting and extending mass surveillance. We're particularly concerned about the lack of discussion of the filter which turns retained data into a massive searchable police database of your location, phone and Internet data. We've delved into the significant new powers for the police below.

The debate on the Investigatory Powers Bill has focused a lot on the new extension to police powers, and the collection of Internet Connection Records to keep a log of everyone's web browsing. Critics like myself worry about the ability this creates to see into everyone's most intimate thoughts and feelings; while proponents are prone to say that the police will never have time to look at irrelevant material about innocent people.

However, the really novel and threatening part of this proposal isn't being given anywhere near the level of attention needed.

The truly groundbreaking proposal is the filter , which could be seen as a government Google search to trawl your call records, Internet and location data. The filter is clearly named so that it sounds helpful, perhaps boring or else maybe something that filters down information so that it is privacy friendly. It is anything but. It is so intrusive and worrying, I would rather you think of the Filter as the PHILTRE: the Police Held Internet Lets Them Read Everything.

Remember when these proposals started, back in the late 2000s, under the last Labour government? Maybe not, but that's how long Home Office officials have been trying to make this happen. Their original plan was to build a single database that would store everything they could find about who you email, message and what you read?, and where you are, as logged by your mobile phone. Place all that information in a single searchable database and the dangers become obvious. So obvious that the Conservative opposition was up in arms.

How on earth would you stop abuse, if all this information was placed into a single database? Surely, it would lead to fishing trips, or police searches to find lists of all the environmental protesters, trades unionists or libertarians, and to identify who it is that seem to be their leaders? How would you stop the police from producing pre-arrest lists of miscreants before demonstrations, or from deciding to infiltrate certain public meetings? Indeed, who would be able to resist using the database from working out who was at the location of relatively petty offenses, perhaps of littering or vandalism, or calculating who had been speeding by examining everyone's mobile phone location data.

So the current government does not want try to hoard everyone's data into a single database. Instead, they've come up with the PHILTRE, which can query lots of smaller, separate databases held by each private company. As this PHILTRE can be applied to separate data stores, all at once, we are in effect back with a proposal for a single government database and all the same problems -- but in a way that government can claim that it is not a single government database .

But as long as the data can be queried and sorted in parallel, it becomes immensely powerful and just as intrusive. For instance, for a journalist to protect against revealing a whistleblower, they would need to avoid not just phoning them, but meeting them while both were carrying their mobiles and creating matching location logs. All of the profiling and fishing expeditions are just as easily achievable.

Most worrying is the authorisation process. Police, agencies and tax authorities will continue to authorise their own access of our personal data, just as they do today with phone call records -- there's not a judge anywhere near the day to day use of this search facility.

The Home Office is selling this Google-style search through the population's mind as a privacy enhancement. Only the relevant search results will be returned. Masses of irrelevant information about other people will not have to be given to officers. They give the example of mobile phone mast data -- where the filter could cut the required information down to just that about the person you need to know about.

This might sometimes be true. But two things make me suspect this is a highly partial story. For one thing, the search engine can tell you about the kinds of things it thinks it might tell you -- perhaps social graphs, location histories, dodgy website visits, organisations supported -- before you ask it. This is to educate and help police get the right information. It is also an invitation to make increasing use of the tool. If it is limited in its purpose, this seems an unnecessary step.

Secondly, there are no limits to what results the search engine might be asked to produce. Nothing for instance, says that only a single person or place can be searched against, so that only one person's contacts might be returned, or just the people at a single crime scene. Thus the prospect of fishing trips is given no legislative limit. The only serious limit is that this information might be kept for no longer than 12 months.

For years privacy campaigners have been trying to explain how your web history and location data can be dangerous tools for personal and whole population surveillance. Now it seems the UK government wants to engage in a whole population experiment to show us what it really means. Parliament, the courts, but most of all, you, can help stop them.

We welcome Jeremy Corbyn's public statement in support of the decriminalisation of sex work. He, more than many, will have in mind the austerity cuts, 75% of which have targeted women. These cuts are responsible for massive increase in prostitution that we have seen in the UK as of late.

With 3.7 million children living in poverty in the UK and 176,000 people surviving on food banks, no wonder that women are turning to prostitution. The northern English town of Doncaster reported a 60% increase in prostitution in 2013, with charities saying, "women are being forced to sell sex for £5 because of benefit sanctions". Sheffield reported a 166% increase in 2014 while charity workers in Hull have gone on record saying "we have started to see women who are literally starving and they are out there to feed themselves".

As poverty and prostitution increase so does criminalisation. We are currently fighting legal cases with women imprisoned for brothel-keeping because they worked in a flat with friends -- obviously much safer than working alone. We are also working with women street workers, who are having their IDs confiscated by police before being told that they can only get them back if they show plane tickets back to Romania. This is happening despite these women having the right to reside in the UK. We are even helping a woman fired from her public service job because she worked part-time in pornography to supplement her wages.

We see daily the injustice of the prostitution laws which force sex workers to work in isolation and danger. As a woman working in Leeds said recently, "the laws are pointing at us and saying, 'nobody cares about you'". That is the view of every killer who has targeted sex workers.

But perhaps the most compelling reason to abolish the laws is because illegality and stigma hides who sex workers are -- mothers, sisters, daughters, aunties and wives --all women (and men and trans people) trying to survive in increasingly harsh economic times. Those feminist politicians who claim to speak for us but who misinterpret, lie, distort and disparage our experience take advantage of our illegal status knowing that it is harder for us to speak publicly to set the record straight.

Approximately 85% of sex workers are women and the majority are mothers, mostly single mums. If prostitution policy and law was framed by these facts we'd get support for mothers and anti-austerity policies not more criminalisation. So thank goodness for Corbyn and his close political ally John McDonnell MP, whose principled support for decriminalisation has meant that groups such as the Safety First Coalition (which includes the Royal College of Nursing), Hampshire Women's Institute, and Women Against Rape have had a voice in parliament.

The evidence of the success of decriminalisation is compelling. At our evidence gathering symposium on prostitution last November, Catherine Healy, founding member and coordinator of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, reported on research from the Prostitution Law Review Committee that found, five years after the decriminalisation in New Zealand, that there had been no increase in prostitution or trafficking. In contrast, sex workers are now more able to leave prostitution and secure other work because they aren't registered and convictions have been cleared from their record. The law decriminalised sex workers on the street and in premises, which has made it easier to report violence and has allowed sex workers to work together, increasing safety.

An independent review by the Christchurch School of Medicine in New Zealand found 64% of sex workers found it easier to refuse clients -- a litmus test of whether women are being forced or coerced.

Yet the Home Affairs Committee is studiously ignoring this compelling evidence. Instead it appears to have a pre-determined outcome to recommend the criminalisation of clients -- a proposal backed by an " unlikely union of evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners ". As one of the women who gave evidence to the inquiry said, "politicians who claim to want to save us by banning our work should first of all say how else we are to survive".

Corbyn and John McDonnell's support for decriminalisation puts sex workers of a par with others who have been unjustly criminalised -- young people, people of colour, immigrant people. And that is right. Women picked up for soliciting have long said that the prostitution laws are to women what the sus laws are to young Black men -- a tool for the police to persecute and harass, with Black and other women of colour as their first targets.

Corbyn and McDonnell take their lead from sex workers who, like other workers, are striving to improve our working conditions. If the Labour party wants an anti-prostitution strategy they should get behind their leader's determined campaign against benefit cuts, sanctions and an end to zero hour contracts ."

Jeremy Corbyn told students in London he wanted a society where we don't automatically criminalise people , The Guardian reported. He said:

I am in favour of decriminalising the sex industry. I don't want people to be criminalised. I want to be [in] a society where we don't automatically criminalise people.

Let's do things a bit differently and in a bit more civilised way.

Of course it did not take long for the nasty wing of the Labour party to crticise their leader and re-iterate that they would like to see men jailed just for wanting to get laid.

Ex-Labour deputy leader Harriet Hatemen claimed prostitution was exploitation and abuse not an industry .

Labour MP Jess Phillips spewed on Twitter:

Man says we should decriminalize a known violence against women. Why did it have to be this man,

But the English Collective of Prostitutes, which campaigns for decriminalisation, voiced its support for Corbyn's comments. Supporters of decriminalisation include Amnesty International, which says it would mean sex workers are no longer forced to live outside the law .

Comment: Right Whinger

6th March 2016. Thanks to Alan

Corbyn's de facto number two, the shadow chancellor John McDonnell, also has a laudable track record of fighting the corner of sex workers.

The nonentity Jess Phillips is a right-whinger with form for trying to undermine Corbyn. As for the bollox spouted by Harridan Hatemen, it mat be worth noting that the International Union of Sex Workers affiliated to the GMB, a TUC-affiliated union, which certainly seems to make them workers. Since HH's old man, Jack Dromey, is a former union official, I'd love to be a fly on the wall of the Dromey-Hatemen kitchen at breakfast!

I never cease to be amazed by the capacity of purported feminists like Hatemen and Phillips to spew crap about prostitution without ever talking to a few tarts.

Update: Corbyn is right -- prostitution must be decriminalised

8th March 2016.  See  article from spiked-online.com by Ella Whelan

We shouldn't punish sex work. We shouldn't celebrate it, either.

Chris Grayling, the Leader of the House of Commons, has refused a request from Rupa Huq, a Labour MP who is the sister-in-law of comedian Charlie Brooker, to consider relaxing censorship rules on how parliamentary TV footage can be used.

The rule, agreed by broadcasters in 1989 as part of a deal to admit television cameras into the Commons, states that footage cannot be used in any light entertainment programme or in a programme of political satire .

However, parliamentary scenes can be included in 'magazine' programmes which also contain music or humorous features, such as This Week, the late-night political show hosted by Andrew Neil, provided that the different types of item are kept separate .

Brooker said that the rules were ridiculous and inconsistent and that the ridiculous ban meant that the government was officially scared of clowns . Other satirists were equally scathing. Rory Bremner said that the advent of the internet meant that the ship has already sailed , while fellow Spitting Image star John Sessions said the obsolete rules represented the last gasp of deference .