BBC News: 'Snooping' bill protests stepped up

[Owen Blacker]

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Shit, even the BBC are calling it the Snooping Bill now!   :o)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_830000/830318.stm
Wednesday, 12 July, 2000, 14:03 GMT 15:03 UK 

'Snooping' bill protests stepped up
By BBC News Online internet reporter Mark Ward 


Opponents of the government's "snooping" bill are keeping up the
pressure to amend or scrap the controversial legislation. 

An alliance of 50 organisations has delivered a letter to the House of
Lords, ahead of the start of the final debate on the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers bill. 

The letter set out the worries of the organisations, which say the RIP
bill gives government unprecedented right to snoop on citizens. 

The increased pressure comes as a government peer admitted that the
bill will mean that sometimes innocent emails will be intercepted when
security forces are carrying out surveillance on suspects. 


Deep concerns 

The open letter called for the government to scrap the RIP bill
because of its chilling effect on civil liberties and the damage it
could do to the UK's embryonic e-commerce firms. 

The letter said: "We are deeply concerned that the bill will inhibit
the development of the internet and e-commerce, while creating a range
of onerous and unfair impositions on individuals, organisations and
companies." 

Organisations signing the letter included The Royal College of
Nursing, the Countryside Alliance, Claire Rayner of the Patients
Association, the Manufacturing, Science & Finance Union as well as
Liberty and other civil liberties groups. 

Signatories to the letter were co-ordinated by civil rights watchdog
Privacy International <http://www.privacyinternational.org/>.

The letter was delivered to coincide with the start of the report
stage of the RIP bill in the House of Lords. 

A Home Office spokesman said the government was responding with its
own open letter that will be published on the RIP website. 

He said there was no chance that the bill was going to be scrapped and
said the concerns expressed in the letter were old worries. 

"The concerns we are seeing now are the ones we have seen from the
start from people that do not want the bill," he said. 


RIP Report 

The protest comes as Home Office minister Lord Bassam revealed in a
letter to Liberal Democrat Lord Phillips that surveillance carried out
under the bill might result in information being inadvertently
collected about innocent citizens. 

Under section 15.3 of the RIP bill security forces gain the right to
capture lots of data and then hunt through it for the information they
need. 

The admission first came to light on technology news website the451
<http://www.the451.com/>. 

The FBI has revealed that it is using a snooping system called
Carnivore, which can collect and sift through hundreds of e-mails. 

Carnivore piggybacks on the network run by internet service providers
and scans all incoming and outgoing email of people under
surveillance. 

Civil liberty groups decried the existence of Carnivore, saying it
violates FBI operating rules that demand it only spies on named
targets and does not carry out "trawling" operations. 

The RIP bill will give police and security agencies the same ability
to tap email messages. 



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Owen Blacker
Senior Internet Developer and InfoSec Consultant, pres.co
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RSA: 0x38fee6c3 |      7c41 e69c 5b8a 484d  22af 1859 f4c9 307b


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