And you thought the Councils were bad?

September 13, 2008 — 585

The issue of councils misusing RIPA has been reported numerous of times, with the lastest article on this site reporting that around 75% of the councils were using RIPA, almost entirely for petty purposes.

However, the South Wales police have taken it one step further. They spent around £100,000 on following one of their officer’s, while he was at home.

The police force alleged that PC Mark Pugh, who was on sick leave, was not really sick and so was not entitled to all the benifits. 

The survelliance included filming Pc Pugh taking out bins form his house and going to rugby matches. A total of 11 officers from South Wales and Dyfed-Powys police forces were used to spy on PC Pugh for months. This work would have required RIPA to be used.

While nobody likes a lazy person claiming benifits (not that Pc Pugh appears to have been that), is it proportional to put vans outside of somebodies home, at a cost of £100,000? The police could only do this, because they had such an arrary capabilties at their disposal. No normal company would ever be able to consider such an operation.

What makes this worse is that Pc Pugh was off work as he had mental health issues. After being involved in a large scale riot he had been diagnosed with depression and had been suicidal, as such he was under the supervision of a psychiatrist.

While the video footage of PC Pugh showed that he had been playing rugby, and moving around normally, this did not show he was mentally well. You can’t measure sanity with video taken by survelliance offices, any more than you can with a themometer.

The courts thought the same and said that evidence against PC Pugh was not valid.

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Councils, Spying, and more of the same

September 11, 2008 — 585

Several months ago this site reported on the spate of incidents in UK where surveillance laws where used against the public for the most petty of incidents. From dog fouling to school selection to children shell fishing.

There was a host of complaints about these issues, with Local Government Association chairman, Sir Simon Milton, writing to all of the councils to warn them that they were misusing their powers and several Amps stood up and commented on the issue, including Brian Binley.

Numerous other influential people commented on the issue including:

Quincy Whitaker, a human rights barrister, who said that “[the] majority of these applications are potentially illegal…Most[ Uses of RIPA] don’t seem proportionate — there are probably less intrusive ways of investigating dog fouling, for instance.”

Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs select committee stated “I am personally shocked by the numbers involved in surveillance by the local authorities. It is important we make sure there is proper accountability and transparency in the way this operates”.

In July 2008 the European Court of Human Rights found that the UK’s surveillance laws lack clarity and accountability to prevent abuses of power.

If this was not enough Privacy International now places the UK in the top rank of monitored countries, in the same grouping as China and Russia. Demonstrating that the time of “Big Brother”, is truly here.

Despite all of this, the incidents continue to happen. 

Recently the Sunday Telegraph produced a report showing that around 75% of councils use surveillance against their own electorate. The site also conducted a freedom of information request on its local council and found they did not use RIPA. There is not an unusually high crime rate in the area, nor is there a large amount of dog mess, piles or rubbish, or hoards of children attending the wrong school – in fact it all seems to work just fine here.

More recently, and perhaps more worryingly, councils are now starting to employ people, and children, to do the spying for them.

This means, due to the way the laws work, councils would not need to use RIPA, so if those powers are ever taken away from them, they already have other methods available to use against their population.

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RIPA used to spy on noisy children – Telegraph

September 10, 2008 — 585

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph found that three quarters of local authorities have used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 over the past year.
The Act gives councils the right to place residents and businesses under surveillance, trace telephone and email accounts and even send staff on undercover missions.
The findings alarmed civil liberties campaigners. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: “Councils do a grave disservice to professional policing by using serious surveillance against litterbugs instead of terrorists.”

RIPA was introduced to help fight terrorism and crime. But a series of extensions, first authorised by David Blunkett in 2003, mean that Britain’s 474 councils can use the law to tackle minor misdemeanours.

Anti-terrorism laws used to spy on noisy children – Telegraph.

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Surveillance Ruling

July 7, 2008 — 585

On 1st July 2008 at the  European Court of Human Rights in the case of Liberty & Other Organisations v. the United Kingdom (case reference 58243/00) the court found against the UK Government.

The ECHR found that UK surveillance laws lacked the necessary clarity and accountability to prevent abuses of power when used to intercept cross-border communications.

The complaint brought by Liberty stated that:

“Relying on Articles 8 (right to respect for correspondence) and 13 (right to an effective remedy), the applicants complained about the interception of their communications.”

The court agreed with Liberty that both the surveillance and the practice of surveillance must be tighter to protect individual privacy rights.

Decision of the Court

Article 8

The Court recalled that it had previously found that the mere existence of legislation which allowed communications to be monitored secretly had entailed a surveillance threat for all those to whom the legislation might be applied. In the applicants’ case, the Court therefore found that there had been an interference with their rights as guaranteed by Article 8.

Section 3(2) of the 1985 Act allowed the British authorities extremely broad discretion to intercept communications between the United Kingdom and an external receiver, namely the interception of “such external communications as described in the warrant”.

Indeed, that discretion was virtually unlimited. Warrants under section 3(2) of the 1985 Act covered very broad classes of communications. In their observations to the Court, the British Government accepted that, in principle, any person who sent or received any form of telecommunication outside the British Islands during the period in question could have had their communication intercepted under a section 3(2) warrant. Furthermore, under the 1985 Act, the authorities had wide discretion to decide which communications, out of the total volume of those physically captured, were listened to or read.

Under section 6 of the 1985 Act, the Secretary of State was obliged to “make such arrangements as he consider[ed] necessary” to ensure a safeguard against abuse of power in the selection process for the examination, dissemination and storage of intercepted material. Although during the relevant period there had been internal regulations, manuals and instructions to provide for procedures to protect against abuse of power, and although the Commissioner appointed under the 1985 Act to oversee its workings had reported each year that the “arrangements” were satisfactory, the nature of those “arrangements” had not been contained in legislation or otherwise made available to the public.

Lastly, the Court noted the British Government’s concern that the publication of information regarding those arrangements during the period in question might have damaged the efficiency of the intelligence-gathering system or given rise to a security risk. However, in the United Kingdom, extensive extracts from the Interception of Communications Code of Practice were now in the public domain, which suggested that it was possible for the State to make public certain details about the operation of a scheme of external surveillance without compromising national security.

In conclusion, the Court considered that the domestic law at the relevant time had not indicated with sufficient clarity, so as to provide adequate protection against abuse of power, the scope or manner of exercise of the very wide discretion conferred on the State to intercept and examine external communications. In particular, it had not set out in a form accessible to the public any indication of the procedure to be followed for examining, sharing, storing and destroying intercepted material.

The interference with the applicants’ rights had not therefore been “in accordance with the law”, in violation of Article 8.

Article 13

The Court did not consider it necessary to examine separately the complaint under Article 13.

This ruling calls into the question that fact the the UK government can monitor any communication at any time, though this is positive ruling for privacy advocates it is unlikely to systems like Echelon.

Press Release by Liberty

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Quote – RIPA use

July 2, 2008 — 585

“I would say that a majority of these applications are potentially illegal…Most[ Uses of RIPA] don’t seem proportionate — there are probably less intrusive ways of investigating dog fouling, for instance.

Quincy Whitaker, a human rights barrister.

“I am personally shocked by the numbers involved in surveillance by the local authorities. It is important we make sure there is proper accountability and transparency in the way this operates”

Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs select committee

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Councils Warned over RIPA Powers

June 28, 2008 — 585

Following the numerous instances of Councils in the UK using their RIPA powers to put people under surveillance for petty offenses everything from dog fouling to school attendance, the councils have finally been warned over their behaviour.

Local Government Association chairman Sir Simon Milton has written to councils warning overzealous use of the powers could alienate the public.

He stated that:

“Parliament clearly intended that councils should use the new powers, and generally they are being used to respond to residents’ complaints about fly tippers, rogue traders and those defrauding the council tax or housing benefit system”

He warned that councils over using their powers could alienate themselves from the public.

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Examples of Data Misuse

June 22, 2008 — 585
Below is a small sample of the discovered and reported cases of data misuse within the government

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Data Retention and Interception

June 13, 2008 — 585

Data Retention

In December 2001, the Parliament approved the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001. This law allows the Home Secretary to issue a code of practice for the voluntary “retention of communications data by communications providers” for the purpose of protecting national security or preventing or detecting crime that relates to national security. It only applies to data that is already being held by the Communication Service Providers (e.g ISP/telecomms) for business purposes. The Code of Practice was approved in December 2003. The goverment has since proposed modifying the ATCS and RIPA to make data retention mandatory and expanding its use to include serious crimes, not just terrorism offenses. A leaked submission by the police and intelligence services to the Home Office in 2000 proposed a seven-year data retention policy, however this has not been followed up and the current voluntary times remain.

Despite the goverment pushing data retention in the to stop the ever present threat of terrorsim, the reality is that the data will almost certanily be used for reasons other than prevention and detection of terrorism. An opinion commissioned by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found that the access to information retained under the act for non-national security purposes would violate human rights and would be unlawful. Despite this the goverment fully intended to allow a whole host of government agencies to access the data, from local police to the  local council.

In June 2002, the Home Office stated that the list of government agencies allowed under RIPA to access communications data was being extended to over 1,000 different government departments including local authorities, health, environmental, trade departments and many other public authorities. The ICO stated that “I clearly cannot carry out meaningful oversight of so many bodies without assistance”, following this and the pubic outcry of so many people accessing so much information the then Home Secretary (David Blunkett) withdrew the order.

The code provides for the following retention time periods:

  • SMS, EMS and MMS: Data retention period 6 months.
  • Email: Data retention period 6 months
  • ISP Logs: Data retention period 6 months
  • Web Activity Logs: Data Retention period 4 day

More detailed information on these retention times is available here.

Interception of Communications

Before the ATCS 2001 Act was created the government created RIPA, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which covers a variety of aspects including encryption and interception of communications. Section 12 of RIPA makes it an obligation of CSP (Communication Service Providers) to maintain an ability to intercept traffic” and “content” of communications, which then allows the govermenment to monitor communications as and when needed, or the in the case of Echelon, all of the time.

An explanation of the terms “traffic” and “content” in relation to RIPA are available on other posts on this site.

RIPA is often in the news for its repeated misuse by councils, from covertly following families, to ensure they go to the right school, to setting up cameras and covert surveillance to monitor dog fouling.

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Use of RIPA by Kent Councils

June 6, 2008 — 585

Below is a list of some of the activities conducted under RIPA by some of the Kent Councils, this information was taken from the Kent Online
• In the case of Kent County Council, surveillance was mainly used by trading standards officers investigating a range of offences from the sale of counterfeit goods to establishing the identity of fly-tippers.
Its activities involved checking phone records 23 times during two inquiries into the storage of petrol without a licence.
In 2007, it used the powers 18 times, with investigations involving monitoring a warehouse suspected of selling counterfeit toys and the surveillance of a vehicle suspected of being involved in cold callers offering to lay tarmac drives.
The previous year, it used the legislation 28 times, chiefly in relation to investigations into the sale of counterfeit goods. On two occassions, it was used to identify cold callers while a major investigation into fly-tipping saw it used for 14 separate events.

• Medway Council confirmed there had been 121 authorised surveillance operations over the last three years but in its reponse to our request refused to provide details, saying it would take too long to collate all the information.
It used the Ripa powers 36 times in 2007-2008; 54 times in 2006-07 and 58 times in 2005-06.

• Maidstone Borough Council carried out a three-week long surveillance on an employee it suspected might be working somewhere else while on sick leave as one of seven authorised operations last year. The claim proved to be unfounded.
It also took photos and video footage while investigating five incidents of fly-tipping throughout the year.

• Dartford Borough Council conducted 21 surveillance operations in 2007-08 for alleged offences that included a drugs operation; off-road bikes causing a nuisance as part of efforts to crack down on graffitti.
It also used the legislation to investigate a complaint of racial criminal damage, in a joint initiative with Kent Police. However, 11 investigations led to no further action being taken.

• Four surveillance operations by Tunbridge Wells Borough Council involved checks on unlicensed drivers and monitoring of a pub that was alleged to be causing a public nuisance to nearby residents.
In one case, it took secret aerial photos during an investigation into an alleged planning breach.

• Swale Borough Council authorised covert operations to investigate one case of dog fouling.
Five other investigations, in which council tenants were suspected of housing and benefit fraud, were also authorised.

• Dover District Council carried out eight surveillance operations into claims of benefit fraud and two into allegations of anti-social behaviour last year.

• Ashford Borough Council carried out just four surveillance operations last year, Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council just two.

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Burnley Council uses RIPA

May 27, 2008 — 585

Burnely Council has become the latest council to be found misusing their surveillance powers, they have been found to be using “RIPA powers” for the investigation of a variety of offences, including dog fouling. This means that they were using covert survelliance of the local population to detect dog fouling.

While nobody likes dog fouling, is it proportional to hire low paid goons, with little to no qualifications, to monitor individuals as they go about their delay business, with the possibility of catching one or two dog walkers allowing their dogs to foul?

RIPA, the law which allows the councils to conduct this spying, was bought in at the beginning of the decade, and was designed to help combat terrorism. Burnley council have been very supportive of the legislation relating to terrorism and stated:

“Burnley Borough Council welcomes this opportunity and fully supports effective moves to strengthen legislation and policing approaches to counter the threat of terrorism.

We feel that there is an important, separate, complementary role for local councils in cooperating with the Police and the community on action to prevent violent extremism through a range of activities and community leadership. The Council is committed to seeking ways to improve this through its work as a Preventing Violent Extremism Pathfinder authority.”

Their response to the terrorism laws can be seen in full here, and the letter they wrote to the home office is available here

Now that we know Burnley are happy to use these more extreme powers for their own petty purposes and empire building, we have to ask if the were  keen for the anti-terror purposes for the greater good, or just to allow them to collect more and more information about their electorate?

Nick Aves, Burnley Council’s resources director, said it was “quite rare” for the powers to be used in this way; but he did not say it would not be used again in this way.

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