I believe in evidence-based policy, and if the Home Office or anyone
else claims that they need new powers over the people of this country,
the onus is on them to demonstrate what they need and why. They should
never assume that they will always get what they want, simply because
they ask for it. Politicians owe it to the people to question the needs,
not just roll over and concede our hard-earned freedoms on request.
Obviously
there is always a balance to be struck when deciding how many powers to
give the state. We benefit from having an effective police force – but
give the police too many powers, and we put too many restrictions on
people’s freedoms. Orwell’s 1984 is the terrible consequence.
The
use of communications data – the who, how, when and where of
communications, but not the content – is definitely useful for the
police, security services, and many others. There is no doubt that if
hunting for a missing child, it is useful to know from where he or she
made a phone call from.
But we cannot simply allow the police to
have a full record of all information, backdated for a year, just
because it may be useful. In exactly the same way, none of us would
tolerate having a CCTV camera in every room, just in case it might
become useful someday to look at the last year’s records.
So there
is a need to strike a balance. A need for the police to demonstrate
that they actually need any new powers, and that the benefits outweigh
the harms – as well as the financial costs.
The current position
is that records are kept of every call you make, text you send, website
you visit and more, for 12 months. This can then be made available not
just to the police, but to a wide range of public bodies, from local
councils to the food standard agency. And they do ask – some 500,000
requests are made each year. The oversight is not as strong as it should
be – in the Police, an inspector can sign off the requests, and in
other bodies it can be even easier.
But the Home Office has pushed
for many years to have even more access to communications data. For
example, because some websites – such as Google and Facebook – are
hosted overseas, they are not bound by the existing UK law.
The
Home Office tried this under Labour, and were rebuffed. Now they are
trying it again under the Coalition, and look set to be rebuffed too.
But years of effort have gone into drawing up proposals for a massive
increase in surveillance and data gathering.
Now, in all those
years of work you might think that the Home Office had found out what
use it makes currently of communications data. Not just anecdotes, but
real figures – a breakdown of the 500,000 requests each year, what they
were used for, how many people were affected and so forth. No such luck.
The Home Secretary referred to ‘Paedophiles and Terrorists’ – the
standard bugbears that we are all, of course, against – but the Home
Office simply had no figures available to justify this. The best they
had was a two-week snapshot, which omitted terrorism and had no listing
for paedophiles. Having little information on how the existing powers
are used gives no comfort that the future powers would be used
appropriately.
Originally, the Home Office plan was to slip these
new proposals in with the Crime and Courts Bill, currently going through
Parliament. If this had been the case, there would have been minimal
scrutiny of what was being proposed – only a few of us would have looked
enough at the details to care – and coupling it with important things
like the National Crime Agency would have made it hard to oppose.
Nick
Clegg stepped in, however, and insisted that this be a Draft Bill,
subject to detailed parliamentary analysis before being formally
proposed to Parliament. I have to confess, I hadn’t at the time realised
just how important a step this was. Rather than the Bill passing
quickly through, a committee has been set up, currently meeting three
times a week, to hear from experts and members of the public, going
through all the proposals, and weighing them up carefully. We and the
public are now far better informed about what currently happens under
RIPA, what the Home Office claims it wants to do, and what the Draft
Bill actually says.
There are many problems with the Bill as it stands, with more and more becoming apparent every day.
Just
to give a flavour, it starts with a power to allow the Home Secretary
‘by order’ to collect any communications data she likes, in whatever way
she likes. The Home Office claims it would only use a limited set of
these powers – but we should never give carte blanche powers like that
to the Home Secretary, whoever he or she may be.
And then there’s
the cost. The government estimates that this will cost 1.8 billion
pounds, over the next 10 years; an absolutely huge figure, with so
little justification. And even the Police don’t seem to be persuaded
this is the right way to spend money. When I asked the Met Commissioner
recently how he would spend £1.8 billion over 10 years, he listed
neighbourhood policing, training, and better use of ANPR and
fingerprinting; communications data didn’t merit a mention.
Nick
Clegg has announced recently that he plans to listen very carefully to
the report of the committee, and in particular to my advice as to what
to do. We’re still going through that process, and I will wait to see
the rest of the evidence before deciding finally. We will report in
November.
But from what I have seen so far, this is a seriously
botched Bill, unfit in principle and in detail. It seems to have been
thrown together without evidence to support the need for such
wide-ranging powers. This is a Bill that should not and will not get
support in Parliament.
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