Paul Stuart | ukwatch.net

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.

Extradition and Human Rights

Alex Doherty — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:08:07 +0000

On October 27 at Bow Street Magistrates Court, London, the latest hearing was held into the Spanish High Courts request for the extradition of Moutaz Almallah Dabas.

The 39-year-old Spaniard of Syrian descent was arrested at his home in Slough, Berkshire, in March on a European extradition warrant. Just 24 hours earlier Spanish police had arrested his brother, Mohannad Almallah Dabas, a Syrian national, in Madrid.

The Spanish Interior Ministry claims that the two brothers helped run a flat where Al Qaeda-inspired militants were recruited, including those directly responsible for the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people and injured 1,500 on March 11, 2004.

Dabass defence lawyer Mark Summers raised concern that his client could face human rights abuses if extradited to what he described as Guantánamo Bay-type conditions that exist in the Spanish judicial system.

During the extradition hearing District Judge Anthony Evans reserved judgment until November 16 after being presented by Summers with a 300-page report detailing alleged torture and abuse in Spanish police stations and prisons.

Summers said, This report contains 755 cases, investigated cases, of torture or ill-treatment within the Spanish judicial system for the year 2004. It breaks down the cases by way of the persons involved and 5 percent of the report, something in the region of 50 or so, were made by people held under the anti-terrorism law and that is significant in the context of this case.

Spains High Court representative John Hardy derided the report as causist and partisan, adding, We are dealing with an EU member state and an established democracy with the rule of law.

Spanish authorities have been accused for a number of years of dismissing accusations of torture and abuse out of hand. And where investigations have occurred they are drawn out and result in light sentences for the guilty. Responding to Hardy, Summers stated, All signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights at one stage or another have been held to be in violation of it. It is no blanket absolution.

Summers dossier is evidence that the antidemocratic methods used to suppress the Basque separatist movement are now being deployed against Muslims.

Spains anti-terror legislation is amongst the most draconian in the world. A Human Rights Watch briefing paper published in March 2003 describes the creation of repressive structures within the judicial system comparable to the US camp in Guantánamo Bay. It states, Spains anti-terror laws permit the use of incommunicado detention, secret legal proceedings, and pre-trial detention for up to four years. The proceedings governing the detentions of suspected Al Qaeda operatives apprehended in Spain in November 2001, July 2002, and January 2003, among others, have been declared secret (causa secreta)...

The investigating magistrate of the Audiencia Nacional, a special court that oversees terrorist cases, can request causa secreta for 30 days, consecutively renewable for the duration of the four-year pre-trial detention period. Secret proceedings bar the defense access to the prosecutors evidence, except for information contained in the initial detention order. Without access to this evidence, detainees are severely hampered in mounting an adequate defence.

In a previous hearing last August, Summers argued, What is at risk here is the disappearance of this client into a black hole.

Summers based his argument on the brutal experiences of dozens of detainees. What Dabas will confront has already happened to those arrested in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack. A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, Setting an Example? published on January 27 this year, examined the cases of those arrested and detained under the war on terror legislation. The lawyer for Mohamed Needl Acaid, remanded to prison on November 18, 2001, says her client is serving what she described as an anticipatory sentence.

She continued, He has been in prison for three years accused of three things: a trip to Bosnia, sending money to people in Jordan and Yemen, and using stolen credit cards. But these are all police suppositions, because to date they havent obtained any proof of criminal activity.

No additional information on Needl Acaid had been gathered since 1998, when the examining magistrate and the public prosecutor both held that there was insufficient evidence to warrant an arrest.

His lawyer commented, it makes you think these guys [her client and the other 13 in pre-trial detention] are being prejudged. She has filed for Needl Acaids provisional release on at least five occasions, but has received the exact same denial of the appeal, with only the date changed, stating nothing has changed since his detention.

According to HRW report the European Court of Human Rights has specifically stated that the reasons given for continued deprivation of liberty must be fully substantiated and domestic courts may not merely confirm the detention in an identical, not to say stereotyped, form of words.

The report notes that Sebastian Sallelas, the criminal defence lawyer for several defendants in the case, said he was convinced his clients were being held in preventive detention: Preventive detention refers to the imprisonment of people suspected of posing a threat to national security or public order where the goal is to avoid the alleged danger rather than the prosecution of any criminal act.

Another lawyer says of the detentions in connection with the March 11 bombings, What should be an exceptional measure has in this case been applied as the rule… they have used preventive detention, and that is barbaric. It looks like they just went around arresting everyone in the same circle; theyre letting them go now either because there really isnt any evidence or in order to fish for more information.

Prolonged detention before trial and the conditions of confinement under harsh security measures may have a deleterious impact on the mental health of the detainees. Several of those detained are taking medication to stabilize mental illnesses developed while under pre-trial detention.

Al Qaeda show trial

Those arrested eventually faced what amounted to a show trial that ended on September 26. Based on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, the Spanish High Court declared that 18 of the 24 accused were guilty of involvement in the 9/11 New York attacks in one degree or another. They received sentences of between 6 and 27 years imprisonment. Convictions were often based on phone tapping, which is inadmissible in court in many other countries, and relied on establishing guilt by association.

Even the right-wing El Mundo newspaper (which has supported the anti-terrorist crackdown) described its dissatisfaction with the flimsy evidence. It conceded that the defendants may have formed part of a group dedicated to making propaganda for the jihad, financing fundamentalist Islamic movements, recruiting fanatics for Chechnya, Bosnia and Afghanistan and maintaining contacts with the Algerian GIA and other violent groups, but added, It is another thing to try to connect this group with the preparation for September 11, which was the basis for reopening this investigation at the end of October 2001.

One of those jailed was Al Jazeera journalist Tayssir Allouni, who denied all the charges against him. Allouni was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Prosecutors used an interview that he conducted in 2001 with Osama bin Laden and the transfer of a small amount of money to another suspect as evidence that he had assisted Al Qaeda.

Allouni is well known in the Middle East as a war correspondent for Al Jazeera. He was bureau chief in Kabul when the bombing of the city commenced on October 7, 2001. He barely escaped with his life after the US bombed the Al Jazeera office in that city. He was also witness to the killing of Spanish cameraman Jose Couso when the US military bombed the Palestine Hotel (home to many journalists) in Baghdad in April 2003.

The father of five was first arrested in September 2003 at his home in Granada. Suffering from a serious heart condition, he was released a month later. On the day of his second arrest, Allouni was due to undergo treatment and according to his wife has received no medical attention since being jailed. She described Spains prisons as having become another Guantánamo.

At the time she told Australias ABC News that her husband had been placed in solitary confinement without his lawyer being notified. According to press reports, prison officials confirmed that Allouni and 85 others were being held in isolation. ABC reported, Allouni must eat meals in his cell and can only exercise alone on the prison patio for one hour a day despite ill health.