The current coalition government came into office with promises to roll back the database state and restore personal freedoms. The primary instrument to achieve this is the Protection of Freedoms Bill, which contains measures ranging from the retention of fingerprints and DNA records to amendments to the Terrorism Act and RIPA. For the last, it “introduces a code of practice for surveillance camera systems and provides for judicial approval of certain surveillance activities by local authorities.”
Ibrahim Hasan, a UK information lawyer, believes that the government has its priorities wrong. He quotes the Home Secretary’s introduction of the bill: “Snooping on the contents of families' bins and security checking school-run mums are not necessary for public safety and this bill will bring them to an end. I am bringing common sense back to public protection and freeing people to go about their daily lives without a fear that the state is monitoring them.”
But Hasan believes that concentration on local authorities’ use of RIPA is media-headline driven when it is the media itself that requires the spotlight. According to the latest annual report by the Office of Surveillance Commissioners, local authorities use RIPA powers sparingly. “By contrast,” writes Hasan, “it seems that there is a much more convincing case for stronger regulation of media (especially the tabloids) and police surveillance.”
Hasan suggests that the Leveson Inquiry into the newspaper telephone hacking scandal indicates that “the police have been misusing their powers under RIPA to assist the tabloids to locate the whereabouts of celebrities and other persons of interest” through the technique of ‘pinging’ mobile phones to pinpoint timed locations. Journalists themselves have also been accused of blagging personal information and hacking politicians phones and computers.
As a result, concludes Hasan, the “government would do more to protect peoples’ civil liberties by turning its attention to media surveillance than local authority surveillance, which is already properly regulated. There is now a very strong case for bringing the media within the scope of the RIPA regime.”