- Plans to extend electronic "snooping" powers
in the UK have been put on hold indefinitely, the government announced
on Tuesday.
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- In a dramatic climb-down, the Home Secretary, David Blunkett,
said he would shelve controversial new proposals to allow a wide range
of public bodies to snoop on people's email, internet surfing activity
and phone calls without the need of a court order.
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- "I recognise there is widespread concern about the
current proposals to regulate how public bodies can access phone and internet
records," he said, adding that much wider public debate was needed
in order to proceed.
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- The announcement came as a surprise, as Blunkett was
expected to outline today new "safeguards" to prevent public
bodies from abusing these new powers.
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- Further consultation
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- Mounting opposition from members of parliament and civil
libertarians, and warnings that the new proposals were unlikely to make
it through the House of Lords, were behind Blunkett's change of heart,
analysts say.
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- Blunkett says parliamentary debate on the proposals will
now follow further consultations over the summer.
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- "Hopefully that means they are completely abandoning
it," says Ian Brown, director of the think-tank Foundation for Information
Policy Research.
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- The powers in question were originally drafted as part
of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000. They and were
intended to help security forces fight "serious" crime.
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- RIPA was seen by the Home Office as a much needed modernisation
of the wiretapping laws. It made it much easier for security forces to
get access to an individual's personal details, without any judicial review.
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- The new proposals would have extended these powers to
a range of public bodies, including the Child Support Agency and benefits
officers.
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- "Absolutely delighted"
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- RIPA does not allow officials to access the content of
a person's emails or phone calls without a judicial warrant. But privacy
advocates were nevertheless concerned that even "traffic" data,
revealing, for example, where a person was at a given time, who they had
telephoned, or what websites they had visited, could reveal a great deal
- and could constitute a gross infringement of their privacy.
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- Richard Clayton, a computer scientist at Cambridge University,
says he is "absolutely delighted" by the government's climb-down.
"There is an argument that some of these limited powers should be
given to a limited number of people," he says. But scrutiny is needed
to ensure the system is not open to abuse, he adds.
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- "The time has come for a much broader public debate
about how we effectively regulate modern communications and strike the
balance between the privacy of the individual and the need to ensure our
laws and society are upheld," Blunkett said.
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- http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992421
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