From today’s Times:
Thousands of middle managers in local councils are being authorised to spy on people suspected of petty offences using powers designed to prevent crime and terrorism.
Even junior council officials are being allowed to initiate surveillance operations in what privacy campaigners likened to Eastern bloc police tactics.
The Home Office is expected to be urged by the Commons Home Affairs select committee to issue guidelines to councils on the type of operations in which surveillance can be used.
Amid increasing concern in Parliament that the UK is slowly becoming a surveillance society, the committee has looked at the operation of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which some MPs say is being misused to focus on petty crime rather than serious offending…
Relatively junior council officials are giving permission for operations to spy on people, their homes, obtain their telephone records and discover who they are e-mailing.
“A lot of councils are making the proactive decision to use these powers more,” a spokesman for Lacors, the central body that oversees local authorities, said…
Human rights lawyers and Liberty, the civil liberties pressure group, last night condemned the widespread use of the Act by councils to deal with minor offending. Quincy Whitaker, a human rights barrister who has advised the police on the Act, said that the way that it is being used risks breaching the Government’s Human Rights Act.
“I would say that a majority of these applications are potentially illegal,” she said. “Most don’t seem proportionate — there are probably less intrusive ways of investigating dog fouling, for instance.
“There seems to be a widespread disregard for whether such snooping is necessary.”
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3 Comments
Misuse of RIPA by local authorities should be of far greater concern to us than whether one has an inalienable right to get rat-arsed on the Tube.
That’s two stories on this this week – the other was in the Telegraph that I saw. About Christmas last year I took it to myself to ask Oxford City, Oxfordshire County and Thames Valley Police how many of these they had issued. TVP said such a request would compromise operations, but the city has never used these powers and the county has nine times in total since they were available to them and in both cases each request has to be authorized expressly by a senior compliance officer. There’s no evidence here that junior officers are getting access to e-mail records just for fun. Indeed, it’s not as easy as that anyway as I understand it, you have to go through some hoops just to get the data – it’s not as if it’s all online and you only need a password to access it that every secretary is given.
Now, that’s not to say that RIPA is a good thing. It is not, and indeed when I was on Oxford City Council when it came in I tried but failed to get a rule put into the council’s constitution that such powers would not be used without scrutiny from councillors. But my admittedly very limited evidence suggests that RIPA is not being used in anything like the number of cases I had expected/feared it might be used when it was introduced.
Also, when the powers over telephone and email records were extended to councils it was clear that the sort of scenarios they would be expected to use them in were not “terror” related at all, but exactly things like benefits cheating. This sort of expansion was predicted and inevitable eight years ago. It doesn’t make it any better that we were told about this before it was introduced of course.
Is anyone actually surprised by any of this? [/weary resignation]