Surveillance Commissioner issues whitewash report

I've written elsewhere about the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, who issued his Annual Report into surveillance in the United Kingdom this week. It shows that the level of covert surveillance in this country is shocking - these operations are now part of our nation's everyday life.

As readers of this site will know all too well, this surveillance isn’t just being run by MI5 or the police, and it’s not just mounted to detect serious crime or terrorism. Very real concerns about covert surveillance by local councils are dismissed by the Commissioner with two cursory paragraphs, with the suggestion that the problem lies with the way that the media reports such surveillance. This really is a grave abrogation of his responsibilities.

As our research showed, local councils approved and conducted over 8,500 separate covert surveillance operations in the last two years. Surveillance has been used for everything from allegations of benefit fraud and fly-tipping to dog fouling and allegations of lying about which school catchment area you live in. For this, councils up and down the country empower their employees to watch and record us for days or sometimes weeks. Take a look at the table in our research and you’ll probably see that your own council has done this. Not only has the media been reporting on a genuine concern, it is far more common and far more serious than the Commissioner can bring himself to admit. He should be a champion of accountability in surveillance, not an apologist for it. After all, this is the body we depend on to bring responsibility to this area – if he won’t take such abuses seriously, who will?

Worst of all, the Commissioner has revealed that after four years of his expensive endeavours the number of operations conducted in the past year that were unauthorised has gone up: there has been an increase in operations that broke the important and serious rules on covert surveillance and should never have happened. In last year’s report, he stated that he was happy that the appropriate disciplinary measures had been meted out in each such case. He gives no such assurance this year.

These unauthorised operations were not only intrusive, but also often extensive - the longest lasted for 24 days. That's over three weeks of illegal surveillance by the state, of people against whom nothing at all has been proven, and have not even been charged, without any apparent repercussions for those who did it. Because the Commissioner refuses to release any details of these unlawful operations, the victims of this outrageous intrusion will never know that they and their families were watched. In such circumstances it is not scaremongering but simply stating the obvious to say that it could have happened to you.

The newest disclosure is really the worst: a total of 661 errors, in which organisations obtained the wrong communications data, were reported to the ICC by public authorities in 2009. Again, instead of being critical of these abuses, the Commissioner is an apologist for those who committed them. Kennedy said that although the number seems large:

"it is very small when it is compared to the numbers of requests for data which are made nationally. I am not convinced that any useful purpose would be served by providing a more detailed report of these errors. I should add that neither I nor any of my inspectors have uncovered any wilful or reckless conduct which has been the cause of these errors," he said.

Kennedy disclosed that a "considerable proportion" of the errors were due to the incorrect transposition of telephone numbers. That is to say that people were snooped on for no good reason due to administrative incompetence by the snoopers, and they have no right to know that their conversations were listened to, or who did it, or for how long, or what they heard.

I discussed this matter on Radio 4’s World Tonight. I stressed the seriousness of the fact that the Commissioner had overseen an increase in unlawful surveillance. It would have been good to hear their view on this but in a moment of delicious but apparently unappreciated irony, the Office responsible for bringing accountability and transparency to this opaque and sometimes frightening field... refused to discuss the matter in public.

By Alex Deane

Comments

[Redacted]

I wasn't aware that there was such an office. If this is the best it can do, it must be a candidate for de-funding I would think.

Is it just a pseudo-authoritative rubberstamp for whatever happens in practice?

[thecredo]

"it is very small when it is compared to the numbers of requests for data which are made nationally..."

These guys seems to have the same comms team as BP, or the Liverpool apologist:

"The truth is, the death toll is very small when you compare it with other major disasters,"

'a "tiny amount" in a "very big ocean"'

Even one mistake is too many. Much in the same way that if you - say - have twelve children and one is killed, that is too many, as well.

We've *got* to get this quota mentality put into the grave, and carry on with some ruddy common sense! It's doing my head in!