Telegraph article on RIP

[Roland Perry]

In article <4847F364.27859.245E7C@davidh.spidacom.co.uk>, David Hansen 
<davidh@spidacom.co.uk> writes
>> It's interesting that this article is more about RIPA to gain comms data
>> (mainly reverse DQ I expect, and I can't get too excited if the most
>> active council has done all of 89 requests in a year)
>
>Im don't believe that the council in Birmingham would have done any of
>this had they not been egged on by the numbskulls in the Home Office.

And I don't believe they didn't. In fact there was so much comms data 
being requested by council trading standards departments that they set 
up a special central unit to manage it. That unit was a casualty of RIPA 
because the rules say you have to make requests yourself, and not 
through a third party (this is in order to make tests of proportionality 
more immediate to the requester, and to reduce the number of people with 
access to the results).

>> than previous ones
>> that have been about councils now required to use RIPA surveillance
>> rules when previously there were no rules at all.
>
>Ditto.

As no-one was keeping records pre-RIPA, it's hard to prove. But I doubt 
the various enforcement branches in the councils were so ineffective 
that they never went out into the field to observe the alleged
perpetrators.
-- 
Roland Perry