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UK: Gov't sweeps aside privacy rights

Josey1Josey1 Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
edited June 2002 in General Discussion

Government sweeps aside privacy rights

Privacy rights swept aside

Stuart Millar, technology correspondent
Tuesday June 11, 2002
The Guardian

Ministers were last night accused of conducting a systematic campaign to undermine the right to privacy as it emerged that a host of government departments, local councils and quangos are to be given the power to demand the communications records of every British telephone and internet user.
A draft order to be debated by MPs next Tuesday reveals that ministers want the list of organisations empowered to demand communications data to be expanded to include seven Whitehall departments, every local authority in the country, NHS bodies in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and 11 other public bodies ranging from the postal services commission to the food standards agency. Until now, the list included only police forces, the intelligence services, customs and excise and the inland revenue.

Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, passed two years ago, each of these authorities will be able, with out a court order, to demand that phone companies, internet service providers and postal operators hand over detailed information on individuals such as their name and address, phone calls made and received, source and destination of emails, the identity of websites visited and mobile phone location data, which is capable of revealing the user's whereabouts at any given time and is accurate to within a few hundred metres.

Ministers have yet to reveal which level of official from the latest list of authorities will be able to authorise a notice demanding data under section 22 of the act. For the police, any officer of superintendent rank or above can demand an individual's records without a court order.

The Home Office insists that the powers, which will come into force in August if passed, are necessary to fight terrorism and crime in an age when communications increasingly take place via email or mobile phone. But last night civil liberties groups cited the expanded list of authorities as fresh evidence of the need for new measures to protect the right to privacy.

Ian Brown, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, an internet thinktank, said: "I am appalled at this huge increase in the scope of government snooping. Two years ago, we were deeply concerned that these powers were to be given to the police without any judicial oversight. Now they're handing them out to a practically endless queue of bureaucrats in Whitehall and town halls."

John Wadham, director of Liberty, said: "This list demonstrates an issue that many people may not have realised: it is not just the police who will be looking at our communications records, it is practically every public servant who will be able to play this game."

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said: "The Home Office has absolutely breached its commitment that this law would not become a general surveillance power for the government. The exhaustive list of organisations who will be able to access data without a court order proves that this amounts to a systematic attack on the right to privacy."

The draft order has also raised concerns that it might undermine investigative journalism. Editors are worried that the identities of sources may become impossible to protect.

Bob Satchwell, director of the Society of Editors, said: "The more we widen these powers and the further we take them away from any judicial oversight, the propensity becomes much greater for people to misuse them to find out where a journalist is getting material for a critical story. It would be different if the authorities had to go to court to get this information because editors would trust a senior judge to take into account the public interest of investigative journalism."

The row comes amid public concern over the threat to individual privacy posed by communications data retention. The Guardian recently revealed that the European parliament had overturned a decade of data protection legislation and approved measures giving member states the power to force phone and internet companies to retain the detailed communications logs of each of their customers for an unspecified period.

The Guardian also revealed last November that access to communications data would not be restricted to anti-terrorist investigations, despite apparent assurances to the contrary by David Blunkett, the home secretary.

Officials from the empowered authorities will be able to access data under any of the broad range of grounds under which data can be obtained under the act. These include safeguarding national security, preventing or detecting crime, protecting public health and safety, collecting tax, and for any other purpose specified in an order by the home secretary.

The measures have also caused consternation among internet service providers. Steve Rawlinson, chief technical officer of Claranet, which has about 500,000 customers in Britain, said: "We deal with a lot of requests from the police at the moment and quite often we have to tell them we are not satisfied that they have sufficient grounds, that they are on a fishing expedition. At the moment, we can tell them to go and get a court order, but when this legislation comes into force, we will have no choice but to hand over the data."

The Home Office said: "Very broadly, all the bodies on the draft order have powers related to preventing crime. The aim is to bring them under the tighter regulatory framework of the RIP act."

Who can track your messages

Government departments

Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Department of Health
Home Office
Department of Trade and Industry
Department of Transport
Department for Work and Pensions
Northern Ireland executive's Department of Enterprise

Local authorities

Any local authority in England and Wales
Any fire authority
Any council in Scotland
Any district council in Northern Ireland

NHS bodies in Scotland and Northern Ireland

The common services agency of the Scottish health service
The Northern Ireland central services agency for health and social services

Other bodies

Environment agency
Financial services authority
Food standards agency
Health and safety executive
Information commissioner
Office of fair trading
Postal services commission
Scottish drug enforcement agency
Scottish environment protection agency
The UK atomic energy authority constabulary
A universal service provider covered by Postal Services Act
http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,7369,731074,00.html



"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

Comments

  • Josey1Josey1 Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
    edited November -1
    Snoops a go-go: UK gov goes mad on privacy invasion
    The Register 11 Jun 2002



    By John Lettice

    The UK government intends to implement sweeping extensions to the snooping powers of official bodies before its controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) even comes into force. RIPA was bludgeoned through Parliament two years ago in the face of heavy opposition, and is to come into force later this year.

    The government, however, plans to widen the list of authorities which can demand access to phone, Internet and email records to the extent that it will be quite difficult to identify the bodies that don't have the authority to obtain data on you without the aid of a court order. RIPA itself was viewed as massively intrusive, but at least focussed on giving investigatory powers to security bodies, customs and the Inland Revenue, whereas the new list adds a wide range of bodies whose need for this kind of information can at best be described as tenuous, and whose capabilities of exercising such powers without abusing them are in many cases debatable.

    Take the Department of Enterprise, for example. If one concentrates very hard, one can perhaps imagine situations where records would be helpful in identifying fraudulent claimants, but it's hardly an issue of national security. Or there's every local authority in the UK, all of whom can now presumably get busy tracking down people who're not paying their local taxes. The fire authorities? It's a tough one, but there's surely some reason they're on the new list.

    Essentially, the extensions (which take the form of a draft order to be debated next week) switch RIPA from covering largely security issues to a set of powers that can be used by absolutely any national or local government body to trawl for information that might be helpful in investigating almost anything they care to.

    So far, the primary defence against RIPA has been the difficulty in implementing it. It allows phone companies, ISPs and postal operators to be served with notices demanding information such as names and addresses of users, phone numbers called, source and destination of emails, the identity of web sites visited or mobile phone location data. The government has not however been terribly effective in putting this into practice, and is now shooting for August. As it hasn't yet specified the level of official in the various bodies added who will have the power to require this information, the latest escalation in repression and privacy invasion could conceivably delay the whole shooting match.

    Ian Brown, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research denounced the plan to hand over power without judicial oversight to a "practically endless queue of bureaucrats.

    "The difficulty that the Government has encountered in getting the right processes in place for the police should make us ultra-cautious in extending these powers to such a wide range of bodies. We don't think that there's been enough resources put into the oversight arrangements for the current proposals, let alone what will be needed for this huge extension. In practice, these bodies are going to obtain this personal data on anyone they wish, without any effective way of checking what they're doing".
    http://www.online.ie/technology/viewer.adp?article=1761296








    "If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
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