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Home Office 'Snoopers' Charter' passes chaotically through the Lords but crucial victories for privacy advocates make the score 11 http://www.stand.org.uk/SnoopersCharter.html Privacy International The government's controversial "Snoopers Charter" was today (Thursday) approved by the House of Lords and will now become law. The decision was as spectacular as it was unexpected. Until 2pm today it appeared that the government's proposals to place every UK email and phone account under surveillance was doomed. Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Cross Bench peers had vowed to oppose them. The Joint Human Rights Committee of the Parliament had expressed "grave reservations": about the plans. Independent legal analysis had ruled them unlawful. Grim faced Home Office Officials sitting in the Advisors Box of the Lord's had admitted they were expecting the worst. However, at the eleventh hour the government snatched victory
from the jaws
of defeat. A "fatality" motion by Deputy Opposition leader
Baroness Blatch
provoked calculated outrage on the government benches. Her motion,
which
proposed to kill the government's Order outright, was a device
that had not
succeeded in the Lords in thirty years. Government members threatened
that
the very basis of the House would fundamentally change were the
fatality
motion was passed. The government vowed that if the motion succeeded
it
would exact revenge by killing any and every Order proposed by
a future The Liberal Democrats, which until then had agreed to block the "data
retention" Orders, which mandated the long-term storage of
all communication
records on the entire UK population, reversed its position. By
4pm, faced
with certain defeat, the Conservatives were then forced to withdraw
the This means that after a short period of implementation of a much derided " voluntary" retention scheme, the government will be able to pass regulations forcing all communications providers to store and yield vast amounts of information on all their customers. The data ‹ relating to who you phoned, who phoned you, mobile phone location, emails sent and received and websites visited ‹ can then be handed over on request to dozens of government agencies. However Privacy International and the Foundation for Information Policy Research, which have campaigned to defeat the proposals were delighted that two important motions were approved by the Lords. Lord Phillips of Sudbury (L-D) proposed that the Interception of Communications Commissioner should be compelled to inform "any person who appears to have been adversely affected by any wilful or reckless failure on the part of any person exercising or undertaking any of the powers and duties conferred or imposed on him by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000". This means that for the first time the oversight body must let people know when their privacy has been improperly invaded. In the past no such disclosure was made. The Baroness Blatch also succeeded in a groundbreaking motion requiring the government to report to Parliament the extent of overseas access to personal information stored by communications providers. Such access is widespread, and available to many developed and developing countries. A furious Baroness Blatch also put the House on notice that a Private Members Bill would be tabled next year to redress many of the problems identified by the Opposition. However, despite these successes, Privacy International believes
today was a
dark moment in the history of the House of Lords. The Parliament's
Joint
Committee on Human Rights in a report released last week on the
Snoopers
proposals had declined to approve the Orders dealing with retention. "The government should never have succeeded" commented Simon Davies, Director of Privacy International. "The proposals were approved only because the Liberal Democrats caved in under pressure from unprecedented threats by the government". "A government ignoring adverse findings from the Parliament's own Human Rights watchdog is something we would have expected from a Banana Republic. This is a shameful episode". However Mr Davies warned that the government has still to face
its toughest
opposition to the proposals and predicted that the proposals would
ultimately collapse. All legal advice indicates that the Snooping
regulations are unlawful under Article 8 of the European Convention
on Human Mr Davies vowed to continue fighting the proposals, first in the
courts, and
second through the use of more aggressive campaigning tactics. "I
would have
no hesitation is taking legal action against Communications Service
Providers who comply with a regulation that is unlawful, regressive, "Through greed and indolence the phone and Internet service
providers have
sold their customers' privacy down the river". Simon Davies of Privacy International can be reached for comment on 07958 466 552 (from the UK) or on (+44) 7958 466 552 (from outside the UK). Email simon@privacy.org A series of regulations (Statutory Instruments) recently laid
before the UK
Parliament intends to create a legal basis for comprehensive surveillance
of
communications. The regulations will allow an extensive list of
public
authorities access to records of individuals' telephone and Internet
usage. Copies of all documents mentioned in this release can be obtained by contacting Simon Davies. Privacy International (PI) www.privacyinternational.org is a human
rights
group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments
and
corporations. PI is based in London, and has an office in Washington,
DC.
Together with members in 40 countries, PI has conducted campaigns
throughout |
Campaign Against Criminalising Communities