A Question of Trust

The Spectator editorialises:

Should the Investigatory Powers Bill be rushed through parliament in the wake of the Paris attacks? David Cameron seemed to suggest so this morning, when he said that the bill was part of his ‘full spectrum’ response.

Britain will be responding to the Paris atrocities, he said, and this… ‘…means boosting our counter-terrorism capabilities. We should think, absolutely, the bill we’re taking through parliament to strengthen our capabilities to intercept the communications of terrorists is a vital part of this.’ 

Asked if he wanted to speed it up, he replied: ‘we ought to look at the timetable’. But why?

The Investigatory Powers Bill will confer no new powers on the spies at all – as No10 confirmed in a briefing to journalists this afternoon.

Our spies can already tap phones and access emails and have done for decades. They are legally entitled to go after anything categorized as a communication.

It’s quite true that they’re in a technological race with jihadis who use every new app and platform to communicate with each other and assume alternate identities.

But our spies have stayed one step ahead and can identify terrorist targets, as attested by the recent RAF drone strike in Syria.

They are not asking for more freedom, nor are they getting it.

It suits politicians to pretend otherwise, because it stops them having to debate other questions like: should we give the taxman powers to spy? Can police be trusted with those powers? 

How much easier it is to claim – falsely – that the spies need extra powers and rush legislation through parliament on this basis. 

The last time that Britain passed spying laws was in 2000, with the flawed Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. 

Talk at the time was — as ever — about the need for our spies to have proper powers (and this before the 11 September attacks). 

But before too long, Ripa was being used by nosey council enforcement types and police officers trawling through suspects’ computers on a hunch. 

Ripa didn’t reveal the secrets of the Blofelds and Goldfingers so much as those of ordinary law-abiding civilians. 

Jenny Paton, Tim Joyce and their three children, for instance, ended up being snooped upon by Poole council, which wrongly suspected they might be fibbing about their address in order to sneak the kids into a better primary school. 

A tribunal later ruled that Poole council had abused its power. ‘A Question of Trust’, David Anderson’s report on surveillance powers, which was commissioned by the government to inform the drafting of the new bill, makes all this clear. 

In spite of being regularly used to justify new snooping powers, suspected terror offences are cited in only 1 per cent of applications to access data. 

A quarter of applications are for the investigation of drugs offences, 10 per cent are for financial offences and 9 per cent for sexual offences. 

Many of these cases may, of course, be serious enough to justify accessing communications data.

The problem with the new bill, however, is not the powers available, but the lack of sufficient restrictions on how they’re used.

It is good that a judge rather than the Home Secretary will in future be required to authorise interception of communications, and that there will be a criminal offence for wilfully or recklessly collecting communications data. But clear limits are lacking.

A Dutch court recently threw out a data-retention law because it didn’t contain set boundaries and allowed communications data to be used to solve bicycle thefts as well as terrorism.

We need a debate like this, to have the limits we agree on enshrined in law.

If constables and council enforcement officers are allowed to behave like jumped-up spies, then they will — spending more time behind computers instead of on the streets.

The danger is not just that citizens’ privacy will be infringed, but that law enforcement will become skewed towards discovering trivial offences rather than serious crimes.

It would be very easy, for example, to use data on our website visits — which the new bill proposes that internet providers should keep for 12 months — to catch people who watch live-streamed television on the internet in spite of not possessing a TV licence.

All this would just jam up the courts even more: TV licence-dodgers already take up one in ten cases heard by magistrates.

Before the internet, police had no way of tracing every book we read, reading every letter we received in the post, and overhearing our face-to-face conversations.

The internet has provided infinite opportunities for snooping and while the spies have used their powers sparingly, the police have not.

The government says it wants one investigatory powers law which applies across all public authorities, from community police officers to spies.

But why?

In Canada, there are two privacy laws: one for the spies and the other for the rest of government. There is merit in this approach.

The law ought to recognise that security services are involved in a fundamentally different activity than officials concerned with minor offences.

For too long, successive governments have hammered through spying laws while muttering about national security and hoping their alarmism would take the place of serious debate.

So if the Prime Minister should resist the temptation to use the Paris atrocities to rush through the Investigatory Powers Act – it would do nothing to help our spies, and it was unworthy of him to suggest otherwise.