surveillance | ukwatch.net

Brown inches closer to ingsoc

Alex Doherty — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:35:21 +0000

The use, misuse and downright abuse of the word ‘Orwellian’ seem to be a prerequisite for much of modern discourse, political and otherwise. One wonders how the man himself would react, having fervently expressed his disgust at the linguistic imprecision prevalent in political commentary. He bemoaned the promiscuous application of the word ‘fascism’ to things as diverse as youth hostels, astrology, homosexuality and Gandhi, so one can only imagine his reaction the to the use of the word ‘Orwellian’ to describe Indian brain scans, employment equity, a recent Jimmy Page album, and a TV programme in which George Galloway wore a leotard and lapped milk from a saucer. Orwell lamented that “it is often easier to make up words…than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness…the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

Orwell was invoked recently in AC Grayling’s Guardian piece, which commented on the Brown government’s proposal to implement a system whereby every email, text message, phone call, VOIP call and web usage in the UK will be recorded, centrally stored, and made accessible to government entities, including those outside of law enforcement. The measure will require a billion incidents of data exchange to be recorded each day. Grayling described this astonishing proposal as an ‘Orwellian nightmare’, and went on to assert that “not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised.”

The objection here is, unfortunately, that (for once) the commentator has undersold the extent to which Brown’s proposal accords with Orwell’s imagined dystopia. It is pertinent to place this proposal alongside other New Labour surveillance initiatives. Firstly, the police are planning to expand their automatic number plate recognition systems to enable them to read 50 million licence plates a day, reconstructing and recording the details of drivers’ journeys, which can then be held for five years. Secondly, the DNA of wrongly-arrested innocent citizens is now held on file indefinitely in a national database (as happened to Darren Nixon in February of this year – his black mp3 player was mistaken for a handgun, and for the rest of his life the national DNA database will testify that he was arrested on suspicion of a firearms offence). Thirdly, the Telegraph revealed this month that local councils are offering rewards of up to £500 to individuals, including children as young as eight years old, who snoop on their neighbours and report minor infractions, which can include crimes as petty as failure to recycle. The description of the role ranges from council to council, from ‘street scene champions’ and ‘street hawks’ to ‘covert human intelligence sources.’ Southwark Council employs 400 such volunteers.

Add to this mix the forthcoming nationwide introduction of compulsory ID cards containing biometric data, the proposed extension of pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects to 42 days, and, of course, that the fact that London’s citizens are caught on CCTV on average every six seconds (with facial recognition technology very firmly in the governmental pipeline). Suddenly the need to consider Grayling’s claim more seriously becomes apparent. Has the UK finally reached a point where comparisons with 1984 are genuinely appropriate?

Brown’s vision of the UK comprises a nation-state where every type of electronic communication (and car journey) of every person, all the time, everywhere, is recorded, with this information being made available to a list of entities that is distinctly shadowy in its precision. In 1984, the Thought Police achieved this level of surveillance by way of the ubiquitous two-way Telescreen, through which party messages were beamed and citizens observed. Siemens’ telecommunications monitoring technology – already sold to 60 countries – hadn’t been conceived in 1948 when Orwell wrote his book, but when combined with an estimated 4 million CCTV cameras, it is arguably more effective than the fictional Telescreen at capturing the day-to-day interactions of the populace. Telescreens could in some quarters be switched off, and paid only cursory attention to the ‘proles.’ Brown’s proposal is all-encompassing. Furthermore, the ‘covert human intelligence sources’ employed by local councils bear more than a passing resemblance to the youth leagues of spies in Orwell’s book, taught from an early age the value of betraying fellow citizens for the all-seeing state.

Finally, consider the plight of an individual detained under the anti-terrorist powers, like Rizwaan Sabir: a postgraduate in International Relations at the University of Nottingham studying terrorism, detained without charge for six days, for possessing an Al-Qaeda document available in paperback at both Amazon.com and the US Justice Department website. The Thought Police in Orwell’s novel would pluck potential dissidents – those yet to actually offend, as in Sabir’s case – from their daily lives, based on covert surveillance, depositing them in the Ministry of Love for re-education through torture. Thankfully, we are not at the stage of re-education through torture – yet – but the mere possibility of a reasonable comparison with the Thought Police is cause for grave concern.

So was AC Grayling right to claim that “not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised”? Well, no. However his error was not the usual hyperbolic cooption of Orwell’s legacy, but a mere error of fact. Orwell did conceive of such a world. However, he did so in the context of a cautionary tale about the imagined excesses of a fictional totalitarian state – not a description of proposals to be included in the next Queen’s speech. In 1984, “there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.” Did Orwell’s title miss the boat by 24 years?

The Shape of Things to Come

Ellie Keen — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:08:31 +0000

Press`Release from Statewatch

The EU is currently developing a new five year strategy for justice and home affairs and security policy for 2009-2014. The proposals set out by the shadowy ‘Future Group’ include a range of extremely controversial measures including techniques and technologies of surveillance and enhanced cooperation with the United States.

A major new report The Shape of Things to come (60 pages) examines the proposals of the Future Group and their relation to existing and planned EU policies. It shows how European governments and EU policy-makers are pursuing unfettered powers to access and gather masses of personal data on the everyday life of everyone – on the grounds that we can all be safe and secure from perceived “threats”.

But how, asks Tony Bunyan, Statewatch Director, “are we to be safe from the state itself, from its uses and abuses of the data they hold on us?”

Privacy swept away by EU’s “digital tsunami”

The report shows how the EU Future Group is seeking to harness the power of what it calls the “digital tsunami” – a rather insensitive concept – for the benefit of law enforcement and security agencies. In the words of the EU Council presidency: Every object the individual uses, every transaction they make and almost everywhere they go will create a detailed digital record. This will generate a wealth of information for public security organisations, and create huge opportunities for more effective and productive public security efforts.

The Shape of Things to come shows how the EU has substituted the concept that data relating to EU citizens should in principle be kept private from state agencies, in favour of the principle that the state should have access to every detail about our private lives. In this scenario, data protection and judicial scrutiny of police surveillance are perceived by the EU as “obstacles” to efficient law enforcement cooperation. The Statewatch report calls for a meaningful and wide-ranging debate” before it is “too late” for privacy and civil liberties.

EU must make up its mind on formal ‘Euro-Atlantic area of cooperation’

In a case study of negotiations between the EU and the USA on justice and home affairs issues, The Shape of Things to come shows how the two powers are considering the establishment of a formal security cooperation framework from 2014.

The Statewatch report also shows how on substantive issues relating to EU-US security cooperation since 11 September 2001, the USA has “got its way” to the detriment of the privacy and protection of data pertaining to EU citizens.

“EU standards have been by-passed or undermined and the USA has steadfastly refused to offer Europeans the equivalent level of privacy protection to US citizens”, says Tony Bunyan.

On the proposal that the EU should tie itself in with the USA across the whole justice and home affairs field, Tony Bunyan argues that “it is hard to think of a greater danger to our privacy and civil liberties”.

“Convergence principle” = “EU state building”

The EU Future Group also calls for the application of the “convergence principle” to policing and law enforcement in the EU. According to the Group, the principle “would apply to all areas where closer relations between Member States are possible: agents, institutions, practices, equipment and legal frameworks”.

While national law enforcement agencies will still continue to work according to their national legal frameworks, those frameworks will increasingly be determined at the EU level, through ‘harmonisation’ or the development of EU institutions and law enforcement agencies.

The Shape of Things to come shows the extent of the consolidation and extension of police powers at the EU level, from mandatory communications data retention to the continued expansion of agencies like the European Police Office (Europol), the EU prosecutions agency (Eurojust), the fledgling EU border police (Frontex) and the planned Standing Committee on Internal Security (COSI).

Before yet more powers over policing and surveillance are de facto granted to the EU, suggests Tony Bunyan, “Europe needs to have a meaningful debate about the direction in which the EU is heading and just what this means for civil liberties and privacy”.

The full Analysis: The Shape of Things to Come is at:
http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/the-shape-of-things-to-come.pdf

Statewatch: Observatory on “The Shape of Things to Come” – the EU Future group:
http://www.statewatch.org/future-group.htm

Tony Bunyan is a writer and journalist and has been Director of Statewatch since 1991. He is the author of The Political Police in Britain (1977), Secrecy and openness in the EU (1999) and has edited numerous Statewatch publications including The War on freedom and democracy – Essays in civil liberties in Europe (2006). He has taken eight successful complaints against the Council of the European Union to the European Ombudsman on access to documents on behalf of Statewatch as well as two successful complaints against the European Commission. In 2001 and 2004 he was selected by the European Voice newspaper as one of the 50 most influential people in Europe.

For more information contact Tony Bunyan:
Statewatch office: 00 44 0208 802 1882
e-mail: office@statewatch.org
Postal address: Statewatch, PO Box 1516, London N16 0EW, UK

NUJ film shows police obstruction of journalists

Ellie Keen — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:59:00 +0000

The NUJ has released a short film highlighting some of the problems faced by journalists covering public demonstrations. View it here

The video was released the day after the TUC in Brighton condemned the erosion of civil liberties and media freedoms in Britain. TUC unions unanimously backed a motion, proposed by the National Union of Journalists, which called for a rethink of government policies that put journalists at risk of imprisonment just for doing their job.

Speaking after the TUC vote, NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Journalism is facing grave threats in an age of intolerance. Whilst on the streets dissent is being criminalized, independent journalism is being increasingly caught in the civil liberties clampdown.”

The nine-minute video, called Press Freedom: Collateral Damage, includes examples of the police obstructing journalists in their work.

Release of the film follows numerous complaints from media workers who have experiences of the police going beyond their powers in attempting to restrict the ability of journalists to do their work. The NUJ’s motion to the TUC was part of a wider campaign for a greater recognition of press freedom by the UK government.

The motion also highlights cases of journalists, such as Robin Ackroyd and Shiv Malik, who have faced the threat of jail because of legal demands to reveal confidential source information.

In his speech to Congress, Jeremy Dear drew attention to the case of Sally Murrer, who is facing criminal prosecution for receiving information from a police source, and highlighted the problems faced by journalists attempting to cover the recent Climate Camp in Kent.

Jeremy said: “The terrorising of journalists isn’t just done by shadowy men in balaclavas, but also by governments and organisations who use the apparatus of the law or state authorities to suppress and distort the information they do not want the public to know and to terrorise the journalists involved through injunctions, threats to imprisonment and financial ruin.

“The use of the Terrorism Act and SOCPA increasingly criminalize not just those who protest but those deemed to be giving the oxygen of publicity to such dissent. Journalists’ material and their sources are increasingly targeted by those who wish to pull a cloak of secrecy over their actions.”

The speech concluded: “This isn’t over-zealous policing this is a co-ordinated and systematic abuse of media freedom – and we must expose it, challenge it and act against those who undermine the rights of photographers, journalists and media workers.

“And we must do so because if whistleblowers and sources fear speaking out, if photographers and journalists cannot probe the dark corners of business, politics or human rights, the ability of the media – already under threat from concentration of ownership and cost-cutting – to hold power to account, to expose wrongdoing, to provide the information on which citizens can make informed decisions about their lives will be seriously compromised.

“The Terrorism Act and SOCPA are not sophisticated security policies – they are the blunt instruments of an intolerant government.

“As if in some Orwellian nightmare the Ministry of Freedom tells us that the price we must pay for peace and liberty at home is not just a war in Iraq – not just the billions spent on war – but, in the wake of the London bombings, is the fingerprinting of council workers and the covert surveillance of M&S workers. It is ID cards and 42-day detention. It is curbs on the right to protest, the civil contingencies act and it is the extension of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, a snoopers’ charter giving access to personal texts, emails and internet use.

“The price is too high. Less liberty does not imply greater security. It never has.

“Our movement has been at the forefront of the great struggles for human and civil rights over the past century. In this age of intolerance new struggles must be waged and we must lead that fight.”

Labour proposes huge increase in state surveillance

tim — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:16:10 +0000

In a further escalation of the attack on democratic rights, the Labour government is proposing a huge increase in state surveillance. It is implementing new measures under the pretext of the “war on terror” to intrude ever deeper into the private lives of people who are viewed as potential criminals rather than citizens.

As things stand, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) introduced in 2004 allows hundreds of public bodies to monitor communications without a court warrant. The Commissioner for the Interception of Communications, Paul Kennedy, oversees 795 agencies and organisations permitted by RIPA to acquire communications data. These include 9 intelligence agencies, 52 police forces, 12 other law enforcement agencies, 139 prisons, 475 local authorities, and 108 other organisations such as the Post Office and the Food Standards Agency.

There were 519,000 requests for information in 2006/07, mainly from the police and security services—up from 440,000 the previous year. Official reports say law enforcement agencies were also authorised to “interfere with someone’s property” about 3,000 times in 2007/08, mount 355 “intrusive surveillance” operations (breaking in to someone’s property or planting a bug) and carry out 18,767 cases of “directed surveillance” (following someone and recording their activities).

Currently, telecommunications companies must store records of all phone calls for a year so that they can be examined. In 2005, Statewatch News Online revealed how T-mobile had “an automated e-mail system that allows law enforcement agencies to retrieve subscriber and billing details by consulting the system directly—all they need is a mobile phone number. This process requires no human intervention from T-mobile staff: the system automatically generates spreadsheets showing the subscriber and billing information and sends them to the law enforcement e-mail address.”

From next year, internet service providers will also be compelled to collect information about the web sites people visit and details of their emails. The Home Office said the new measures would force companies to store “a billion incidents of data exchange a day” and dismisses any concerns about these developments with the usual mantra, “we consider that these measures are a proportionate interference with individuals’ right to privacy to ensure protection of the public.”

There are plans to force all companies to hand over their data to one central “super” database so that government agencies will no longer need to submit requests to individual companies.

The government is also putting pressure on organisations besides the police and security services to make more use of spying powers. Kennedy complained, “I am concerned that so many authorities who applied for powers to be given to them, apparently do not use them and I do not know why this is … if this state of affairs continues unexplained, then consideration must be given to removing the powers from them.

“During the period covered by this report only 154 local authorities made use of their powers to acquire communications data. A total of 1,707 requests were made for communications data and the vast majority were for basic subscriber information. Very few local authorities have used their powers to acquire itemized call records in relation to the investigations, which they have conducted. Indeed our inspections have shown that generally the local authorities could make much more use of communications data as a powerful tool to investigate crime.”

UK Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, agreed saying, “The commissioners’ reports offer valuable oversight and provide reassurance that these powers are being used appropriately.” She added: “We need to ensure Ripa powers are used appropriately and are not undermined.”

Smith’s last remark is a reference to the recent furore over local authorities using phone and email records and carrying out video surveillance of people applying for schools for their children, housing benefit and other social services. The papers were also full of headlines about spying operations to detect dogs fouling the footpaths and people using refuse bins improperly.

Sir Christopher Rose, the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, warned local authorities that they risked losing “the protection that RIPA affords.” He used the “lack of understanding of the legislation” shown by councils and their “serious misunderstanding of the concept of proportionality” to call on them to “invest in properly trained intelligence officers who could operate covertly.”

Rose added, “The government is reviewing those public authorities that have access to these powers to ensure that they have a continuing and justifiable requirement for them. On completion the government will list the authorities that can use each of the powers and the purposes for which they can use them, and set out revised codes of practice.”

Simon Milton, outgoing chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA), attempted to defend local authorities against these accusations saying, “Councils have been criticised for using the powers in relation to issues that can be portrayed as trivial or not considered a crime by the public. Yet councils are caught between the rock of public opinion and the hard place of being told they should actually be using some of these powers more widely.” He agreed, however, that, “... it is important that they use these powers carefully and appropriately and we will be working with [the Surveillance Commissioner] to help enable this.”

Last April, Milton was the driving force behind a proposal to use supermarkets to collect data on migrant workers. Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, told MPs, “The LGA has recently suggested that we look at footfall in supermarkets. They reckon Tesco has pretty good accurate information about the people who use their stores. I welcome that kind of imaginative thinking if it can help us to get a better and more accurate view at the local level of what the impact [of migration] is.”

Earlier this year popular opposition to Labour’s anti-terror legislation and its erosion of civil liberties allowed former Conservative Shadow Home Secretary David Davis to adopt the mantle of “defender of liberty” when he won the Haltemprice and Howden by-election. A similar thing has happened with these new proposals. Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers has warned about “the ceding of intrusive powers to local government and other bodies and giving them access to once sacrosanct personal data” and Dominic Grieve, the current Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, said, “Yet again the Government has proved itself unable to resist the temptation to take a power, quite properly designed to combat terrorism, to snoop on the lives of ordinary people in everyday circumstances.”

The new powers are linked to the enactment in British law of a European Union directive on data retention, which the Labour government was largely responsible for steamrolling through the European Union in 2005.

It claimed they were vital to defeat terrorism after the September 11, 2001 bombings in New York but, in fact, the EU was considering police-state measures well before then. In 1998, attempts were made in the Enfopol proposals to allow law enforcement agencies access to all communications, which were only withdrawn after widespread condemnation by civil liberties groups. This, after all, was not long after the enactment of limited reforms expressed in Human Rights Acts and Data Protection procedures.

However, following George Bush’s October 2001 letter to the EU, which demanded that countries “revise draft privacy directives that call for mandatory destruction to permit the retention of critical data for a reasonable period” the Belgian government back by the UK introduced proposals for mandatory data retention.

In October 2005, after months of secret meetings, the European Council with its UK Presidency published a draft directive. The UK Home Secretary, Charles Clark, warned the European Parliament that if it did not vote for the proposals “he would make sure [it] would no longer have a say on any justice and home affairs matters.”

Civil rights organisations put their faith in the European Parliament to block the proposals. One NGO asked, “... the European Parliament faces a crucial decision. Is this the type of society we would like to live in? A society where all our actions are recorded, all of our interactions may be mapped, treating the use of communications infrastructures as criminal activity.”

In the event, the draft was fast-tracked through the parliament with little debate and few amendments and became law after the vast majority of socialist and conservative MEPs voted for it.

As many lawyers and experts pointed out, any EU member state was, in effect, now free to retain “any type of data for any type of security purpose for any period at all.” They expressed concern that there would inevitably be demands for more draconian measures such as ID cards required to use internet cafes, the banning of all international email services such as Hotmail, and blocking the use of all non-European Internet Service Providers.

The unprecedented infringements of civil liberties that the Labour government and its European counterparts have implemented and are proposing are not motivated by the “war on terror”. As the political representatives of big business and the super-rich, they are conscious that they cannot secure a popular mandate for policies based on militarism, colonial conquest and the systematic destruction of the living standards of millions of people and are preparing other means for their enforcement.

Snooping silo to cost millions

tim — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:57:35 +0000

The government is pressing ahead with plans to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a massive central silo for all UK communications data, The Register has learned.

Home Office civil servants are working on plans for the database under the banner of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). The team has recently been expanded and a director-level official appointed to run the project, which is not yet official policy in public.

Sources said secret briefings revealed the cost of the database would run to nine figures and has already been factored into government spending plans. The IMP budget was part of the intelligence agencies’ undisclosed funding bid to the Comprehensive Spending Review last year. In an answer to a parliamentary question on 8 July, the Home Office refused to provide any budgetary details, citing national security concerns.

The sum will dwarf the £19m we recently reported the government has given telecoms companies to service authorities’ data requirements since 2004. The überdatabase will render existing arrangements for sharing communications data with government agencies obsolete.

The project has been pushed hard at Whitehall by the intelligence agencies MI6 and GCHQ. One ISP source described their demands as “science fiction”. It’s envisaged that the one-stop-shop database will retain details of all calls, texts, emails, instant messenger conversations and websites accessed in the UK for up to two years.

Communications providers fear a technical nightmare if they are forced to implement common data formatting rules. GCHQ declined to comment.

A pilot scheme will see probes inserted in networks owned by one mobile, one internet and one landline operator, sources said. It’s thought the database could be administered by an expanded National Technical Assistance Centre, a Home Office agency. The probes will not record content of communications, which is seen as intrinsically less useful for intelligence data mining efforts.

A Communications Data Bill mandating the database was expected to be proposed before the summer parliamentary recess, but did not appear. It had been planned that the database would be bundled with the EU Data Retention Directive (EUDRD), which must be enshrined in UK law by March 2009.

However, last week the government released a consultation paper on transposing the Directive as a standalone statutory instrument. Laws made by statutory instrument do not require a vote in Parliament.

Amid widespread headlines decrying the long-published EUDRD as another “snoopers’ charter”, insiders wondered what had happened to the Communications Data Bill and its central database. A Home Office spokeswoman said the bill will be published at some time this year. She told The Register that plans had changed “to make the best use of parliamentary time”.

When the Bill was announced by Gordon Brown in May, apart from transposition of the EUDRD, its aim was cryptically described as to “modify the procedures for acquiring communications data and allow this data to be retained”. At Whitehall, sources said advocates of the überdatabase have sucessfully lobbied that a central repository is required to “maintain capability” to monitor communications.

In his 8 July parliamentary answer, Home Office minister Lord West indicated that view has become policy when he wrote:

The objective of the interception modernisation programme is to maintain the UK’s lawful intercept and communications data capabilities in the changing communications environment. It is a cross-government programme, led by the Home Office, to ensure that our capability to lawfully intercept and exploit data when fighting crime and terrorism is not lost.

The “maintain capability” lobby argued that when everyone communicated using BT landlines, government intelligence gatherers could simply contact the operator to get call records. Now we all use myriad devices and services, the only feasible solution is to pool the data centrally, they contend.

Others have countered in Communications Data Bill discussions that a central, searchable database will not “maintain capability”, but grant investigators unprecedented power to cross-reference data sources (including location data from mobile phone triangulation), go on “fishing trips”, and infringe privacy.

The Information Commissioner’s Office voiced such opposition when early details of the IMP were reported in May. But according to our sources, public resistance to the überdatabase has so far had no significant impact on policy.

The massive investment promises a bonanza for IT contractors. Answering a parliamentary question about the project’s feasibility, Lord West said: “The private sector is likely to play a major role in this work and the programme will be conducting a competitive tender and entering commercial negotiations to commission its services.”

DNA database ‘criminalises’ the innocent

William Benzies — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 19:07:03 +0000

The Citizens’ Inquiry report, overseen by the Human Genetics Commission (HGC), also said that the length of time that the DNA of people who have committed an offence should remain on the database “should be proportionate to their offence”; however, for children aged between 7 and 17 years old, the maximum should be five years, it concluded.

The HGC said: “Currently no distinction is made between someone who has been arrested for breach of the peace and someone who has murdered somebody.”

During the four-month inquiry the HGC found that the database contained the details of four million people. However, it is believed that up to a million of these have never committed a crime; this includes the profiles of 100,000 children. The HGC said this “criminalised” people.

It also urged ministers to take control of the database away from the police and the Home Office.

Before 2001, the police could take DNA samples during criminal investigations, but had to destroy the records if the person was acquitted or charges were not brought.

But the law was changed in 2001 to remove this requirement, and then again in 2004 so that DNA samples could be taken from anyone arrested for a recordable offence and detained in a police station.

Innocent people who volunteer to give a DNA sample during a police inquiry also have their details kept on record.

The HGC now wants an independent body set up to control the information claiming, “past actions and hidden agendas have shown that the Government cannot be trusted”.

Genewatch UK, an independent not-for-profit group that monitors developments in genetic technologies, agreed with the recommendations.

It warned that as the DNA database got bigger, the number of false matches was expected to increase.

Dr Helen Wallace, director for the charity, said: “Keeping people’s DNA indefinitely allows the Government unprecedented powers to implement surveillance on ordinary citizens and their relatives.”

However, the Home Office described the database as a “key police intelligence tool” and said that there were “obvious reasons for detaining the samples”.

A representative for the department said: “The benefits of NDNAD lie not only in detecting the guilty but also in eliminating the innocent.”

She said that, in 2006 to 2007, 41,717 crimes were solved using NDNAD sample matches. These included 452 homicides, 644 rapes, 222 other sex offences, nearly 1,900 violent crimes and more than 8,500 domestic burglaries.

“The database will also build public confidence as elusive offenders will be more easily detected and brought to justice,” she added.

Genewatch said this was not the case. “DNA evidence is not foolproof,” said Dr Wallace.

Call for system to ensure proper use of CCTV

William Benzies — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:42:24 +0000

A new system should be introduced to ensure that the growing number of CCTV cameras are used properly, Ann McKechin, the Labour MP for Glasgow North, will propose in the House of Commons this week.

She said: “Seventy percent of CCTV is operated by private companies. There are 16 different types of system operated by public authorities in the Strathclyde Police area. We need a system that makes sure that cameras are used properly.”

The back bencher is proposing a statutory duty for public bodies such as local authorities, transport groups and housing associations to work together with their local police forces to achieve streamlining of public systems.

Ms McKechin wants shops, shopping centres and licensed premises to agree a code of conduct on the use and storage of CCTV images.

Her proposals would require private organisations which control large areas open to the public such as cinemas, hotels and shopping centres or large bars and clubs to provide the local police force with up-to-date information on the type of CCTV systems that they use and how they use them.

The 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain has led to accusations that the nation has become a “surveillance society”, which was one of the issues at the centre of the campaign by David Davis, the former Shadow Home Secretary, who last week regained the seat of Haltemprice and Howden in a by-election.

Last week, the latest row over CCTV cameras emerged in the idyllic fishing village of Elgol on Skye, where locals have complained over the siting of a £1200 camera by the local council, claiming it was an intrusion into the area’s tranquility.

However, Highland Council has made clear that the only reason it has installed the camera is to monitor a dispute between two rival boat-trip companies.

Ms McKechin will use the parliamentary device of the 10-minute rule bill on Wednesday to raise the issue of CCTV cameras. Without the backing of the UK Government, it will not become law.

What's it got to do with RIPA?

Ellie Keen — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:00:09 +0000

Liberty called for an overhaul of RIPA yesterday after the European Court of Human Rights slapped the UK government over the way it applied the UK’s previous interception legislation.

But the Home Office today said it did not see that the judgement had any implications for the UK’s current suite of laws covering covert investigations.

The court ruled that the UK had violated article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, by tapping communications of Liberty, along with British Irish Rights Watch and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties between 1990 and 1997. Article 8 quaintly demands the right to respect for private and family life and correspondence.

The three human rights groups had claimed that the MoD’s Electronic Test Facility had eavesdropped on their phone, fax, email and data comms between 1990 and 1997.

The three had first lodged complaints with the UK’s Interception of Communications Tribunal, the DPP and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, to “no avail” with local courts ruling “there was no contravention to the Interception of Powers Act 1985”.

Liberty et al then took the case to the European Court Human Rights, which after a mere nine years decided that there had indeed “been an interference with their human rights as guaranteed by Article 8”.

The court found that the 1985 Act gave the UK government “virtually unlimited” discretion to intercept communications between the UK and an external receiver, and “wide discretion” to decide which communications were subsequently listened to or read.” The government had guidelines to ensure a “safeguard against abuse of power”, but these were not included in legislation, nor made available to the public.

The court concluded that the UK’s 1985 interception law “had not indicated with sufficient clarity… the scope or manner of the exercise of the very wide discretion of the conferred on the State to intercept and examine external communications” so as to guard against abuse of power.

The 1985 Act and the 1990s eavesdropping on Liberty and its Irish counterparts came against the background of the IRA’s armed campaign against the British state.

Over a decade on, and the 1985 Act has been replaced by RIPA. It has the same objective in detecting terrorism, serious crime and the like, but is more commonly known for being applied by local councils to people suspected to circumventing school applications procedures and not cleaning up after their dogs.

Gareth Crossman, Liberty’s Policy Director, said in a statement yesterday the judgement highlighted the need for a review of RIPA.

Liberty’s legal officer Alex Gask said: “While secret surveillance is a valuable tool, the mechanisms for intercepting our telephone calls and emails should be as open and accountable as possible, and should ensure proportionate use of very wide powers.”

Mark Kelly, Director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, said the judgement had clear implications for many other Council of Europe member states, including Ireland. ”Our lax data interception regime will require a thorough overhaul in order to ensure that it meets the standards required by the European Court of Human Rights under Article 8.”

The Home Office was less vocal, saying it did not think the judgement had any implications for RIPA. While yesterday’s judgement concerned the 1985 Act, a Home Office spokesman said there were no legal challenges against RIPA.

The Surveillance Society Does Not Work

Ellie Keen — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:29:38 +0000

Costing in excess of billions of pounds each year, every single area of the British surveillance society has been proven ill effective when dealing with crime, fraud and terrorism – the very reasons government officials implement such measures.

Which begs the question: How can the Government justify such spending when it also imposes an increasing risk to our personal freedom and privacy? What is more, as current technology has failed to live up to the expectations of the British Government they still have widespread plans to advance citizen surveillance like we have never seen before.

Passport Interrogations

The latest statistics are cause for concern. A procedure introduced in 2007 made it compulsory for all passport applicants to attend face-to-face interviews.

We were told this was a necessary measure in fraud prevention but out of 90,000 interviewees not a single criminal had been caught. The cost of the network has run into the hundreds of millions.

DNA Database

More statistics show the DNA database, which contains the details of over one million innocent people, has almost zero effect in solving crimes. On average just 1 in every 800 crimes will be solved and the cost runs into the millions, turning the innocent into suspects. Each DNA sample added to the database cost £3,575 – last year the database held 660,000 samples.

Phil Booth of NO2ID said: “This utterly blows away the myth that the DNA database is the perfect detection tool. It is, in fact, creating-a nation of suspects.”

The British DNA database contains 4.5 million samples and is the largest in the world yet it does not hold the information of terrorist suspects or serious offenders currently in jail.

Police across the EU can access the database creating what civil liberty advocates call a ‘Big Brother Europe’.

CCTV

Just this week it was revealed that only 3% of London street robberies were solved using CCTV. Britain is the most monitored country in the world with an average of one CCTV per ever 14 people.

“Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working,” said Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville.

Still the development of a national facial recognition CCTV database continues at the taxpayer’s expense.

RIPA

What is more worrying still is the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), a spy law that was introduced in 2000 which gives the police and security services the power to monitor people and their communications. In 2002 the act was extended to include local councils allowing them to commit extensive surveillance of its citizens.

The law was introduced to catch terrorists but is currently being used to stop benefit cheats, anti-social behaviour, graffiti and even poor parking.

The abuse of Government authority is abundantly clear as our privacy and freedoms are needlessly stripped way while the taxpayer is forced to pay for technology which fails to protect us from criminals or terrorists.

A surveillance society simply does not work.

London Olympics terror threat used to vastly increase surveillance powers

tim — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:53:47 +0000

The threat of terrorism at the 2012 London Olympics is being hyped up in order to justify a vast increase in the surveillance powers of the British state.

According to a memo leaked to the Daily Telegraph, Home Office officials are planning to expand the police DNA database to identify suspects and use greater powers to track individuals through advanced closed circuit television (CCTV) technology and the Oyster card used by millions of people on London’s bus and rail network.

The memo discusses different means the government could use to persuade the British public to accept these measures. It asks, “To what extent should the expectation of liberty be eroded by legitimate intrusions in the interests of security of the wider public?” and concludes, “Increasing [public] support could be possible through the piloting of certain approaches in high-profile ways such as the London Olympics.”

To that end, ministers, police chiefs and officials have stepped up their demands for more security measures, utilising the Games. Last month, Lord Dear, the former Scotland Yard head of operations, made a public announcement expressing his doubts over present police capabilities to deal with the event. He said that the police force is too short of manpower to deal with the extra security needed and likened it to a “Sixties car in the 21st century,” adding, “If the model is flawed now, it will certainly be flawed in four years’ time.”

“It’s fairly obvious to anyone that major terrorist groups will not be particularly interested in attacking the Beijing Olympics,” Dear said. “But in four years’ time they will have the London Olympics as a target and we need to be best positioned to counter that well in time.”

Dear’s announcement was made despite the fact that there are a record 140,000 police officers in service and the Olympics security budget has risen sharply by £238 million in the last few months. At the end of last year, Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell released figures that showed that the initial security budget of £200 million in 2005 had spiralled to more than £1 billion.

Dear’s comments reflect those of the most senior officers in the police. The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, has also expressed concern over existing security arrangements and outlined a plan for them to be beefed up in readiness for the games. He has also said that special security and training will be required for athletes and the 200 heads of state expected for the opening ceremony. These proposals will inevitably involve extending the budget still further.

As well as increasing the number of police, the proposed scheme involves an elaborate and sophisticated security system spanning the whole of London. According to a BBC report last month, the Metropolitan Police Service wants to pool its 10,000 existing cameras with the thousands of traffic and congestion cameras already in operation across the city.

This would give the police control over a vast network of up to half a million CCTV cameras, making it the largest of its kind in the world. The network would then be controlled by a central £100 million bomb-proof command bunker operated jointly by the military, police and intelligence services brought together under the umbrella of the Olympic Security Directorate.

The Olympic security coordinator, Assistant Police Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, has made several statements over the last few weeks that indicate just how huge the increase in surveillance will be. Speaking at an international security conference in Abu Dhabi, Ghaffur outlined new ticketing technology to be used on the London transport system to track the movements of every individual, as well as “second-generation” computer technology that can track individuals through face recognition. The computers can use identity-recognition techniques to compare video against a database of digital faces.

A pilot scheme involving 750,000 mugshots has already been completed. Using the facial-mapping software connected to the CCTV cameras, an alert will flash up as soon as a known person appears on the screen. He added, “We will have the most secure and transparent ticketing system. Tracking technology is being developed—a spectator will be tracked from the venue to his or her home with these tickets.”

Other measures outlined by Ghaffur include dividing London into three security zones, three extra helicopters to carry out close surveillance, an increase in the automatic vehicle number plate recognition system, and checks using biometric fingerprints on the 50,000 workforce being used to build the venues.

Currently, the police can only check fingerprints and photographs from suspects after they have been arrested. Under these new powers, the police will be able to carry out these checks instantly with hand-held devices that are connected to the security database. Peter Neyroud, the chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency, said, “We are trying to get a really disciplined understanding of how to use these tools before the Olympics. That is a really important time scale for us.”

As well as increasing the size of the British police force to 9,000 for the major Olympic events, there are also proposals to draft in extra manpower from private security firms and foreign armed police. Scotland Yard has called for these measures on the basis that too few British police have firearms training to cope with the events, and the costs of training them are prohibitive. The contracted armed police will be used to guard dignitaries, athletes, the main Olympic Park and other sports venues.

Ian Blair told a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority, “The principle must be that we don’t want armed foreign police, but there’s a ‘but’—and the ‘but’ is twofold. One, you may not be able to get any foreign police unless they are armed, because they won’t feel easy being unarmed in public scenarios like that. Two, do we actually have, in this case, sufficient capacity to have enough armed officers to do the job?”

All of these extra resources will mean that the security budget for the games will mushroom in the next four years. Denis Oswald, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee’s London 2012 coordination commission, has admitted that it is “impossible to predict” how much money will need to be spent when the games are still four years away. He said, “It’s a very difficult area but if we want to have occasions like the Olympic Games, where hundreds of thousands of people meet, then you have to make sure they are safe, otherwise you just give up and the terrorists will win.”

This refusal to draw up a fixed budget on the basis of a terrorist threat that is “impossible to measure” amounts to a blank cheque that Londoners and the British people will ultimately have to pay. More importantly, the machinery is being created that is necessary to impose a highly integrated police/military apparatus in Britain’s capital city, under the pretext of keeping the country safe from terrorism.

Surveillance Society

Ellie Keen — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:44:29 +0000

In 2004, Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, warned that Britain was ‘sleepwalking into a surveillance society’. In 2006 he suggested that we were ‘waking up to a surveillance society that is in fact all around us’. He hasn’t said much this year, but by implication it must be around breakfast-time in the surveillance society by now.

It’s easy to get worked up about surveillance. By definition, the surveillance society is not a democratic society in which surveillance is pervasive. It’s one in which surveillance is so pervasive that it threatens the very fabric of democracy. The libertarian intuition that we are ‘descending into a police state’ is borne of this concern. As ever more laws are introduced to regulate social and material life (not least the 3,000 new criminal offences said to have been introduced by New Labour), and ever more aspects of our lives are monitored and recorded, the more we are asked to account for ourselves and the more we can be held accountable for.

In a nutshell, the problem is that it is but a few discrete steps from the information society we cherish to the surveillance society we fear. To avail ourselves of today’s hi-tech goods and services we have little choice but to allow those who provide them to collect more and more information about us. And let’s be honest: as long as they keep this information secure and confidential, we’re not all that bothered. Secretly, we may even quite like being profiled, targeted and ‘rewarded’ with Amazon book recommendations, discounts and freebies.

Although unwanted ‘spam’ has gotten beyond a joke, the principles of ‘data protection’ appear to work reasonably well in the private sector. The 1995 and 1997 EC directives, and the 1998 UK Act, have imposed clear legal obligations on ‘data controllers’ to protect personal information, while ‘taking your privacy seriously’ has become a corporate mantra.

So far so good: things to hide, but little to fear. Bring the state into the debate, however, and the equation quickly changes. A new generation of surveillance technologies, population databases, identity management systems, ‘dataveillance’, data-sharing and data-mining tools are providing the state with the capacity to construct an almost unimaginably detailed picture of our private lives. At the same time, our celebrated data protection laws are being systematically circumvented and unravelled in order to legitimise the very practices they were designed to prevent.

Who’s tapping your phone?

A few years ago, the police needed a warrant to access your telephone records – now all they need is your phone number. This revolution in communications surveillance was carefully orchestrated. In 2000, parliament adopted the misleadingly titled Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which, rather than regulating state surveillance, bequeathed to the police and a host of other public bodies the spook-like power to access directly the records held by communications companies. In place of a judicial warrant, an ‘authorisation’ by a senior officer would now suffice. In accordance with data protection rules, telecoms companies were also duly deleting our phone records after we had paid our phone bills (a matter of a few months at most). ‘Not so fast,’ said the Home Office, using the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (ATCSA) to introduce a voluntary code on ‘data retention’, under which the major ‘telcos’ would not only retain their records for up to one year, but provide the police with direct access to their databases. The House of Lords did its level best to restrict the purpose of the Act to ‘serious crime’ but this would inevitably prove meaningless once data had been retained.

Not content with the voluntary code, the Home Office now demanded mandatory data retention by all telecoms companies and internet service providers (ISPs). But rather than returning to parliament, which had already judged ATCSA a bridge too far, the UK government went to the EU to seek an agreement with the force of European law. A discreet amendment to EU data protection rules followed in 2002, and an EC directive on data retention was eventually adopted in 2006.

In 2007, the Home Office returned to parliament to make its voluntary code mandatory by statutory order (meaning no debate), with the justification that the UK was merely fulfilling its obligations under EU law. This is a flagrant case of ‘policy laundering’. Just as ‘money laundering’ describes the passage of illegitimate funds through outside institutions and back into legitimate circulation, policy laundering involves the use of intergovernmental organisations to agree policies that lack political legitimacy in order to bring them into practice.

The cumulative effect of mandatory data retention cannot be understated. All our telephone and internet traffic data must now be stored for at least 12 months (perhaps longer in future – up to three years as in Ireland, or five as in Italy) in case the police or other state agencies need to look at it. The list of other agencies includes, among others, the Tax Office, the Food Standards Agency, the Department of Health, the Immigration Service, the Gaming Board, the Charities Commission and 475 local councils.

Should the police wish to see your telephone records today, they no longer need to show ‘probable cause’ to a judge. They just need to turn on their computers (or phone a friend). In 2005/6, this power was used a staggering 439,000 times over 12 months – a figure certain to rise with mandatory data retention and its extension to internet usage by 2009. The lack of independent scrutiny means we can only guess what the police were up to, but in accessing records more than 1,200 times a day, we can be certain that their activities went far beyond the scope of organised crime and terrorism.

Pulling a Swift one

Telecommunications data retention is but one example of the state placing legal obligations on the private sector to facilitate surveillance. ‘Policy laundering’ is again in evidence, somewhat ironically, in the EC money laundering directives of 1991, 2001 and 2005. These directives have effectively reversed the principles of banking secrecy and privacy in financial transactions by placing a legal obligation on financial institutions to retain data for five years and report all ‘suspicious financial transactions’ and customers to the police. In the UK, ‘failure to disclose’ those suspicions is now a criminal offence punishable by up to five years imprisonment.

The money laundering directives now also apply to auditors, accountants, tax advisors, estate agents, lawyers and notaries, dealers in high-value goods and casinos (not that this has done anything to curb systematic tax evasion and corruption by the rich and powerful), while under the UK Terrorism Act 2000, we are all now liable to prosecution for ‘failure to disclose’ any suspicions we may harbour about terrorist activities. As these so-called ‘due diligence’ obligations come to represent the wholesale privatisation of surveillance, government whistle-blowing, as David Kelly and Craig Murray can testify, is positively discouraged.

Further obligations have been placed on the airline industry to provide states with information about their passengers (so-called ‘passenger name records’ or ‘PNR’). Under successive EU-US PNR agreements – which the European Parliament voted against on four occasions – US agencies now have direct access to European passenger reservation databases. There are few meaningful restrictions on the use or onward exchange of the data they extract. This means that even if you’re only taking a BA flight from London to Amsterdam, up to 35 categories of personal information that you supply could find themselves in the US Department of Homeland Security’s inbox. Perhaps it’s time to start reading the ‘terms and conditions’ before ticking that box? Except that if you don’t tick that box, you can’t book the ticket.

In other cases, corporations are simply handing their data over to state agencies in the absence of any lawful requirement to do so. In 2006 the New York Times broke the story that the US was secretly monitoring every transaction sent through the global Swift money transfer organisation – which is based in Brussels – via an illegal ‘mirror’ in the US. The EU responded by formally granting the US access to the Swift data.

It is suggested that the use of ‘mirrors’ by the US government is widespread, and endemic where US-based multinationals are concerned. This begs a question: when corporations are requested to hand over or provide states with access to their data in the name of combating terrorism or some other evil, are they really going to refuse in practice? The same question applies to public bodies, with Transport for London apparently all too ready to provide the security services with a ‘backdoor’ into the congestion charge and Oystercard systems.

Stasi 2.0

The debate about ID cards masks far more insidious developments. Over the coming decade, the vast majority of the EU’s law-abiding population will be fingerprinted, registered and placed under de facto surveillance. Once again, governments have taken advantage of the EU to ‘harmonise’ national policy on the introduction of ‘biometric’ passports, ID cards, resident permits and visas. Article 18(3) EC of the EU Treaty should have prohibited EU legislation from the outset as it states clearly that the power to adopt legislation ‘shall not apply to provisions on passports, identity cards, residence permits or any other such document’. The member states simply ignored this provision and then used the new ‘reform treaty’ to belatedly add these powers to the EU mandate.

Under the ID Cards Act of 2006, from around 2010 everyone renewing their UK passport will be required to attend one of 69 ‘enrolment centres’, where they will be fingerprinted (all ten), photographed and asked any of the 200 questions designed by the Home Office to test the applicant’s identity, provenance and entitlement to remain in the country. Under EU rules, applicants for a visa to any EU member state will soon be subject to an almost identical process in their own country (with data retained in EU databases even if the visa is refused).

Your new biometric passport will contain an embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that includes your fingerprints and other personal data, an identity card (with another RFID chip) and a number. The RFID chip is there to transmit your data, from distance, to special airport scanners, which scream ‘hack me’ to all those so inclined.

Your special number relates to your record in the UK national identity register (NIR), which links you to every other piece of information the state has ever collected about you. As the campaign group NO2ID has explained, the NIR will become ‘an index to all other official and quasi-official records. Through cross-references and an audit trail of all checks on the register, the NIR [will] be the key to a total life history of every individual, to be retained even after death.’

At the same time, a new generation of ‘e-borders’ will mean that all entrants are fingerprinted upon entry and given a de facto police record. The UK ‘e-borders’ system is to contain up to 90 specific categories of data on individuals and will record all movement into and out of the UK.

Shocked by the Stasi analogy in the subheading? You may be missing the point: the Stasi didn’t ask many questions because they already knew all the answers. Nor is it simply a case of ‘Business or pleasure, sir?’ making way for some rather more direct questioning. As more and more data is collected on the premise of border control, the techniques and technologies deployed at the border are simultaneously being deployed on the streets. ‘Multi-agency’ police checks (basically roadblocks with benefits, tax, immigration and DVLA inspectors in attendance), massive immigration raids and collective expulsions, hand-held fingerprint scanners, mobile access to police computer systems – these are all now matters of policy rather than legislation, and the subject of little if any debate.

You are a security risk

States are also investing heavily – and usually secretly – in the kind of predictive algorithms developed for direct marketing purposes in the belief that ‘risk profiling’ will help identify terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, problem children (see ‘Generation ID’, opposite) and other dangerous people before they have the chance to do us harm. This corresponds to more and more ‘preventative’ police powers – Asbos, security-based detention and so on. As EU policies, ‘terrorist profiling’ and computer-assisted passenger screening are now being introduced across Europe.

These types of programmes raise several fundamental objections. Primarily, by using assumptions about ethnicity, religion, nationality, lifestyle, education, health, wealth or criminal record as indicators of risk, these systems are intrinsically discriminatory. In turn, they inevitably lead to actions against large numbers of innocent people on a scale that renders the exercise both unacceptable and pointless. In the wake of the discovery of the Hamburg cell’s involvement in the 9/11 conspiracy, for example, German federal police agencies collected and analysed data on some 8.3 million Muslims (and suspected Muslims) in Germany but failed – despite hundreds of surveillance operations, arrests and interrogations – to find a single terrorist.

As Douwe Korff, international law professor at London Metropolitan University, points out, it is important to stress that this is not something that can be fixed by better design: ‘Attempts to identify very rare incidents or targets from a very large data set are mathematically certain to result in either an unacceptably high number of “false positives” (identifying innocent people as suspects) or an unacceptably low number of “false negatives” (not identifying real criminals or terrorists). This is referred to scientifically as the “base-rate fallacy”; colloquially, as “If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, it doesn’t help to throw more hay on the stack.”’

Democracy’s prospect

Despite the fact that the judicial regulation of surveillance is fast disappearing, many liberals have faith that the surveillance society can be somehow ‘democratised’ – a few new data protection rules here, a little bit more accountability there. This is disingenuous to say the least: mass surveillance, data retention and risk-profiling are the very things data protection law was designed to prevent. Once these practices are introduced, the law can give little practical effect to the supposedly fundamental right to protection from undue or arbitrary interference by the state.

Others suggest that the very same technology used to hold the citizen to account can be turned inwards, so that ‘glass citizens’ are governed by transparent states, as it were. But in a country that won’t even allow telephone intercepts as evidence in court because the police and security services don’t want to compromise their secret listening programmes, this appears a remote proposition.

So the job rests firmly with what remains of society. But in the absence of any rational appraisal as to the desirability and effectiveness of surveillance systems, never mind more concerted efforts to halt the march of the surveillance state (particularly via the EU), there can be little cause for optimism. And if you tolerate this, your children really will be next.

Ben Hayes is a researcher with Statewatch and the Transnational Institute