RIPA authorisations consultation response - no use of encryption ?

[Caspar Bowden]

> bounces at chiark.greenend.org.uk] On Behalf Of Ian Batten
...
> legislation very closely --- that this repeated claim that RIPA is or was
> intended to be somehow limited to anti-terrorism holds the slightest water.
> The list of authorised bodies was developed in parallel with the bill itself, and
> Trading Standards, DHSS or whatever it was called that week and other
> bodies far removed from terrorism were always present.

It's bit more complex than that. When FIPR was on RIPA's case in Parliament, of course we suspected that the clauses allowing other bodies to be added to the list of traffic data recipients looked too heavy duty not to be planned for use. So we duly pressed the govt. via oppostition questions in debate, and got a Minister to intone "we have no plans yada-yada". Was this a lie? Were officials lying to Ministers? I suspect it was very like in The Thick of It. Anyway a year or so after RIPA went through (and after an election now with ramblebrained Blunkett as HomeSec), the govt. said "Stone me, looks like we'll have to add hundreds of other councils/public bodies"

Of course all this is somewhat orthogonal to the question of statutory purposes for which comms data can be obtained, which were always way (way, way) broader than counter-terrorism. When this was raised during RIPA debate, typically the government would imply the legislation was all "about" terrorism, but then offer up some tragic hypothetical in a lesser domain as a case which no sane person would want to exclude.

Also, what the Home Office press office would put out to the media never had any particular connection to the truth or what was being told to Parliament. The press office just made up whatever sounded plausible, and what a broadsheet crime reporter would expect the legislation to say. But most of government is like that the past 10 years at least.
...

> d to possibilities they didn't
> realise existed, but we simply can't know if RIPA has increased or decreased
> the levels of state surveillance because there are no records worth much from
> prior to its inception.

Anyone in any doubt that RIPA has led to a "motorization" of surveillance across all sectors has not been paying attention.

The basic criticism of New Labour home secretaries is they have simply gone to ACPO (especially) and asked "what do you want", and after prioritizing their surveillance wish list through the prism of populism, just gone and enacted it. Labour thought that being more socially authoritarian than the centre-right ever used to be (Blair's strategy never to be outflanked on law and order) was a vote-winner with their core and middle-england, thus a no-brainer. They have had not the slightest serious interest in human rights or unintended consequence critique.

caspar