UK surveillance laws tightened up as most spying demands to be subject to warrants A very rare thing has happened to British state spying laws: they have been tightened up after parts of the so-called Snoopers' Charter were formally commenced into law. Newly commenced sections of the Investigatory Powers Act, better known as the Snoopers' Charter, will slightly restrict the ability of local councils and …
Proxy consent is not consent.
A veneer of due process, is not due process.
Simply ask yourself if this is a) to protect people from unwarranted (and warrantless) surveillance, or b) to protect the snoopers and the telcos from possible liability, if this is ruled illegal.
It's clearly b) and its not a step in the right direction, because it simply delays the correction to this bad law.
By the time you see the need to put in the checks and balances, it will already be too late to do it.
It is meaningless without enforcement and sanctions.
For example, in 2016 the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that UK security services had illegally collected confidential personal data on an industrial scale for nearly twenty years. There were no consequences for the crime, other than a government spokesman saying Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
Well of course it is. There have never been so many ways to get data on people, not to mention the data people themselves willingly post in social media.
Surveillance organizations are positively creaming themselves daily on all the stuff they can gather without any oversight whatsoever. And if a judge starts getting uppity, they just promise to not do it any more, continue doing it, and flag it under National Security where no judge can go.
It's a great time for surveillance. Not so much for Democracy. And I would really like to know just how many crimes all this "surveillance" has prevented.
Because that's how they're presenting it, right ? They need surveillance to find terrorists before a bomb blows. So how many terrorists have they stopped ? I think we should be told.
Then again, that just means that I'm expecting them to actually tell the truth, which is a patently ridiculous notion.
So let's all just carry on with our lives, and wait for better times.
States : "any surveillance power granted to the public sector under any law other than the Snoopers' Charter itself or the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) now can't be exercised unless your telco or Royal Mail (or parcel courier, for that matter) can be persuaded to hand over access to your communications."
So, essentially, they have reduced the powers of RIPA, but if the telco or postal can be "persuaded", then they will hand over the data anyway ???
What if the telco or postal think, maybe we ought to charge for this - and so it then becomes a profit decision for the postal/telco.
I think the law should be changed to notify that the person has been investigated by non-criminal bodies, maybe 1 year after the investigation - so we the people can then decide for ourselves about any abuse of power.
strangely enough, I was phoned by my (italian) bank to come and sign to accept an anti-terrorism check on my finances, under the strict Italian privacy laws. They mentioned that 'it was purely routine' but it wasn't.
I have evidence that my house was broken into at the same time. I still haven't been notified that I have been the subject of a non-criminal investigation. It might be fun one day to ask a bit.
That's what happens when you sit as an official observer on some rather serious telco standards bodies for retained data, so now who else was on that committee?, hmm - the 3 russians busy with SORM & SORM II, the british 'expert' liasing with huawei UK research, the chinese themselves and then rather a lot of......
Not sure why you got downvoted.
I have seen a council small van parked up, with a person sitting in it, watching - multiple times in different locations.
I was riding my bike on the pavement in the instances involved (nutter drivers in lorries speeding on B roads). So i asked what he was doing - as the van had darkened windows at the side for rear seat passengers. He replied that he was checking for streets being clean. Not sure why he needed to sit and wait, and it wasn't bin day either in both instances.
Besides, if it's something so sensative/personal that it's deemed to require permission, what the hell have the telco or postal service got to do with being able to authorise it?
When did they become judges? Just because they carry the data, it doesn't give them carte blanche to access it.
Any telco or other organ that parts with data because it was 'asked nicely' needs to be taken to court preferably by as many people as possible, so the a precedent can be set on what, when and to whom, data can be released.
Otherwise there is no real difference to before.
anyone trying to spy on your communications data must now get the permission of your telco or postal service - or convince a judicial commissioner to sign off a warrant forcing disclosure
Wait, what? Permission of my telco should be trivial to get - the council can just clag them on the PSL and they'll bend and receive. Permission of the postal service.... so just ask Royal Mail? WTF have those dinosaurs got to do with anything? I'm not sure what I've missed here but I hope its something....
The judge bit is a good move.
The Royal Mail, and most other country's postal services have the longest tradition of providing lawful(ish) intercept services.. So their 'Black Chambers', where correspondence between suspected miscreants could be opened, examined, and then sent on. Plus powers to open & inspect packages for illegal stuff, hence why postal services can have some LEA-type powers. I think in the US, their USPS Postal Inspectors have more powers than some other policing agencies.
@Claverhouse
"Just privatize all the snooping and the arrests to the Free Market ! Which always acts to the benefit of everyone..."
Please tell me that isnt an attempt to justify the total failure by pointing out another way to totally fail? Surely there is a better way, which probably involves people being allowed some measure of privacy and not all free until a chosen public sector peeper wants to violate you.
If I pay you to do some work for me, what should I do if I find you are also doing work for someone else at my expense rather than charging them for it?
Somebody - Bury's residents in this case - were paying to have their rubbish collected. The newsagent should have been paying commercial rates to have his commercial rubbish collected but it's the residents who ended up paying for it. And then Bury's residents got to pay a second time because where does the council get its money from to pay the fine? But 'Yay' for those people sticking it to the Council! Power to the People!
And some people wonder why local government has a hard time balancing the books.
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