BBC News - 'Fresh proposals' planned over cyber-monitoring

[Ian Mason]

On May 22, 2013, at 9:26 AM, Roland Perry wrote:

> In article <519BFD2D.5070102 at zen.co.uk>, Peter Fairbrother <zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk 
> > writes
>> Of course throwaway dongles, unsecured WIFI, free public wifi, TOR,  
>> and so on need no mention here. But I wonder if Her Majesty knows  
>> about them?
>
> Her government does. But it's never a good argument that you should  
> give up picking the low-hanging fruit, just because there's some  
> harder to reach fruit elsewhere.
>
>> Does anyone know the history of how and why telephone logs became  
>> fair game for Plod?
>
> I could write a book about it.
>
> Did you watch 'Endeavour' (the 'Morse' prequel). I've not seen the  
> whole series yet, but they've done reverse-DQ phone numbers in two  
> of the plots so far.
>
>> I mean. it's not obvious that Plod should have pretty much  
>> unrestricted access to comms data logs anyway.
>
> There's two elements to this. One is whether the access is required  
> at all (and checking who a suspect has been in contact with is  
> normally regarded as a legitimate investigative technique), the  
> other is to what extent it's "pretty much unrstricted".

I can state from personal direct knowledge that in the early 90's that  
one non-metropolitan police force had unfettered online access access  
to BT's reverse-DQ and unlisted number databases. In the instance I  
directly observed no procedure or justification was required - just  
physical access to the terminal connected to BT (which in this case  
was situated in a suite of offices normally used as a major incident  
room alongside a PNC terminal and one connected to a database of all  
electoral rolls - both with similar lack of access controls or  
procedures).


>
> I won't re-run the RIPA [vs DPA 29(3)] debate for the nth time.
>
>> Even then there is a big difference between telephone logs and  
>> internet logs, which are much more revealing.
>
> Which is why there's the tailpiece in RIPA s2(9)
>
> -- 
> Roland Perry
>