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Big Brother is not in the public interest Simon Davies The news that more than 1,000 requests a day are made to "intercept" our phone calls, post and email should come as no surprise to anyone observing Britain's rapid descent into mass surveillance. What may be more of an eye-opener is the extent to which the Government has systematically embedded secrecy, incompetence and spin into the process. The state can intrude into our communications in three distinct ways. It can bug our phone lines, it can open our mail and it now has the ability to access our phone and email records, discovering everything about our calling patterns, email usage and our networks of friends and colleagues. This latter innovation has become an epidemic. According to yesterday's annual report by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy, more than 600 public bodies can now request covert access to the communications records of the entire population. The Government has been working for years behind the scenes in Brussels to create an EU-wide directive to permit this free-for-all, ensuring that the few local privacy safeguards that remain are dismantled.
The majority of requests relate to the supply of "communications data" rather than actual interception - or bugging - of phone conversations. However, access to the information held about you by phone companies and internet providers ensures that authorities can discover and investigate all your networks of friends and colleagues, how often and when you communicate with them, and exactly where you've been communicating with them. In short, your life story. The powers that allow this are contained in a statutory instrument implementing the EU Data Retention Directive, which was put in place to set the ground rules for spying on British communications. Under this power, every interaction you have on any phone anywhere in the country must be logged, stored and made available to government. With such a rich reserve of data at their disposal, it was inevitable that local authorities and agencies would find innovative and diverse uses. The information is being requested for almost every imaginable reason: national security, crime prevention (including minor offences), preventing disorder, the country's "economic wellbeing", public safety, public health, assessing or collecting any tax, duty, levy "or other imposition" or collecting anything that is owed by anyone to a government organisation. Most advanced democracies enjoy legal protections that limit the power of the state to conduct such extensive surveillance. Not so in Britain. The Data Protection Act, for example - almost the last remaining statutory safeguard - has yet again been trampled. As long as a surveillance regime claims to be in the "public interest", it is almost always exempt from key provisions of the Act.
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