Feel free to insult me : Government backs Section 5 reform

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Home | 4 Comments

Do not adjust your screen – we bring good news from the Home Office.

From Lord Leveson’s report to the increasingly heavy-handed arrests for social media, freedom of speech was a major issue for Big Brother Watch in 2012 and we were at the fore of calls to change the law.

Today we had a glimmer of hope 2013 will be the year the tide turns and freedom of speech is enhanced and protected.

Speaking as the Crime and Courts Bill returned to the Commons for its second reading, the Home Secretary confirmed the Government would accept Lord Dear’s amendment to the legislation and support amending the Public Order Act 1986 to remove the word ‘insulting’ from Section 5 of the Act.

This is a triumph for David Davis MP, Peter Tatchell, Rowan Atkinson, the Reform Section 5 campaign and all those who like Big Brother Watch supported the campaign – from the National Secular Society to the Christian Institute.

In a civil society, it is not for the police to intervene when someone feels they have been insulted. The Home Secretary and her Coalition colleagues should be applauded for this important reform.

This is a simple change but one that will do a huge amount to protect free speech. As the Director of Public Prosecutions and his predecessor both recognised, this change does not diminish the abilities of the police to arrest people for threatening or abusive language, nor does it make it harder to prosecute incitement.

We said at the time of the Government’s opposition to the amendment in the House of Lords it was a bizarre position to take and are very pleased that common sense has prevailed.

Of course, this is not the end of the campaign to defend freedom of speech. The Communications Act 2003 (responsible for the #twitterjoketrial ) and the Malicious Communications Act 1988 (the Poppy arrest) are both in dire need of reform – new guidance is not enough.

We hope after today’s announcement the Home Office is inclined to explore these issues too.

Common sense returns for bin fines

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Emma Carr Posted in Bins, Civil Liberties, RIPA, Surveillance | Leave a comment

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles MP has announced that new legislation will be introduced this year which will scrap hefty fines for putting a bin out on the wrong day. Talking to the BBC Sunday Politics Pickles promised: ’Fines for putting a bin out on the wrong day would be scrapped. If you put the wrong yoghurt pot into the wrong bin, it is ludicrous to fine people.’

This is an issue that we have been keeping an eye on for several years. Lifting The Lid highlighted that 68 local authorities had been secretly putting microchips in residents’ bins. The research revealed that at least 2.6 million households have had their bins microchiped. Eric Pickles is absolutely right to take action to abolish these powers and to try to bring some sanity to the way councils seemingly view themselves as a police force free to pass absurd rules and dole out fines on a whim. Read more

The Prum Treaty: a disaster waiting to happen’?

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Emma Carr Posted in Civil Liberties, DNA database, Europe, European Arrest Warrant, Home, International | 2 Comments

The Prüm Treaty may yet be implemented in the UK as a report shows that the European Commission plans to force the UK to allow other member states access to personal details of every motorist in Britain as well as access to the national DNA database and fingerprint records.

The Home Secretary has indicated that she is minded to opt out of the European Home Affairs Injustice measures in 2014, a step that would enable a full and frank discussion on how to sufficiently protect the rights of UK citizens. We can now hope that the Home Secretary will share the same robustness towards the European Commission on this matter.

The Government misjudges the problems of judicial reviews

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Emma Carr Posted in Home | 2 Comments

We recently wrote about the Government’s plans to shake up the judicial review process by making it “leaner and faster”. However, it would seem that yet again the Government has prescribed a solution that doesn’t fit the problem.

The recently published 2020 Vision: An Agenda for Transformation, highlights that ‘criminal’ and ‘other’ applications for judicial reviews has barely risen since 1997 (see graph). However, judging from the evidence presented in the same essay, what has risen is the number of reviews based on immigration. Charlie Elphicke MP notes that “It’s not hard to see why there has been increasing concern in the past decade. In 1997, the number of applications for judicial review was 3,848. By 2011 the number had risen to 11,200. Read more

Calling all deviants down under!

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Emma Carr Posted in CCTV, Data Protection, Technology | 50 Comments

Bored with playing the lottery? Like watching strangers on CCTV? We have found the perfect website for you. There is now a website that allows you to monitor CCTV footage.

The expansion of the website to the Australian ‘market’ means that internet users 12,000 miles away can access the footage from 200 cameras in the UK. The ‘service’, offered by Cornwall based company Internet Eyes, has around 8,000 subscribers who pay £1.99 a month or £15.00 for a year, allowing them to watch 10 minutes of footage at a time and to make five alerts a month when they believe they have spotted a crime. One stipulation of the subscription is that users are unable to monitor footage from cameras within 30 miles of their own location.. Prizes are offered of up to £250 a month for people who successfully detect shoplifting or other crimes taking place.

The website is a sad indictment of how out of control the British obsession with CCTV has become. Also, given the fact that users don’t know where the camera they are watching is located, it’s also impossible for them to raise an alarm with the police.

Clearly, this is sort of website is a deviant’s dream, giving armchair snoopers the ability to sit and watch CCTV footage from across the country at their leisure. The people watching these cameras have no training, no legal oversight and have to pay to use the service. We should be asking ourselves what kind of person volunteers to spend their time watching CCTV cameras in shops they have no connection with in the vague hope of winning a prize? It’s a pointless and perverted system that puts privacy at risk and it is baffling as to whether it is even legal.

Looking back on 2012

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Research and reports | 2 Comments

We’d like to thank you for your support in 2012 and wish you all the best for 2013.

Looking back on 2012, we’re very proud of what Big Brother Watch has achieved. The Joint Committee on the draft Communications Data Bill concluded the draft Bill needs a comprehensive re-write, adopting a number of Big Brother Watch’s recommendations after we gave oral evidence to Parliament for the first time. We also attended all four party conferences.

We led opposition to Google’s new privacy policy and eagerly await the results of an EU investigation into the company. Our research into how many people had read the company’s new privacy policy was cited by the European Commissioner responsible for data protection, while Big Brother Watch was invited to join the Ministry of Justice’s Data Protection advisory panel.

Southampton and Oxford councils were taken to task after our complaints to the Information Commissioner about their audio CCTV plans for taxis, a story we ensured was heard worldwide.

Free speech has been a major issue of campaigning in 2012, with several successes. The House of Lords voted again to reform Section 5 of the Public Order Act, while our opposition to statutory regulation of the press won plaudits and bolstered support for the introduction of a custodial sentence for breaches of the Data Protection Act. We were one of the most vocal critics of decisions to arrest people for postings on social media where the only harm had been some people’s offence and as we called for, new guidance has since been issued by the Director of Public Prosecutions. We campaigned against default-blocking of internet content, a campaign that in the past week has led to Government policy rejecting such an option. We also joined the global internet blackout to oppose ACTA, with the campaign leading to the legislation’s downfall.

The Protection of Freedoms Act introduced a number of measures in Big Brother Watch’s manifesto, from the DNA Database to CCTV regulation. Far more needs to be done, but the legislation was a good start.

2013 is set to be another busy year, with Communications Data, CCTV regulation, school biometrics, privatised surveillance and medical privacy. We hope you can continue to support us.

Research highlights from the year

From CCTV in Schools to the on-going problems of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, our research over the year cast new light on the surveillance state and the widespread civil liberties issues that concern us.We began the year by highlighting how local authorities had spent £515m on CCTV in four years, before exposing that 3 million British people had been background checked in 2011. In March we highlighted how nine in ten users had not read Google’s new privacy policy,Following the Protection of Freedoms Act, we cast our light on the DNA Database, exposing how police forces were not equipped to implement the legislation and reviewed how the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act continued to be used by local authorities and public bodies. The report included a foreword from Secretary of State for Local Government Eric Pickles.

Our ground-breaking research into school CCTV exposed more than 200 schools with cameras in changing rooms and toilets, prompting widespread media debate, while Conor Burns MP to authored an excellent paper on the need for reform of the European Arrest Warrant.

Finally, we concluded the year with details of the hundreds of local authorities who had lost their access to the DVLA database, and before the end of the year unveiled new shocking statistics on the CRB system branding innocent people as criminals.

Here’s to 2013!

Whose record is it anyway? Thousands of CRB errors revealed

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Data Protection, Information Commissioner, Police, Research and reports | 8 Comments

Today Big Brother Watch has unveiled the scale of errors in the criminal record check system.

Nearly 12,000 people over the past five years have wrongly been branded criminals or seen irrelevant or inaccurate information disclosed during criminal record checks.

11,893 people successfully challenged CRB results in past five years
£1.98m paid out in redress
4,196 people challenged information held by a local police force
3,519 people given the wrong person’s criminal record
4,088 found inaccurate information or potential wrong identity on police national computer

We’ll be writing to the Information Commissioner to highlight the scale of this issue and the clear issues that this research identifies.

Lords says yes to Section 5 reform

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Freedom of Expression, Police | 4 Comments

Last night the Government suffered heavy defeat on the reform of Section 5, a campaign Big Brother Watch has been proud to support.

As Baroness Smith of Basildon noted: “it is nearly a year since the Government launched their consultation on public order policing and whether the word “insulting” should be removed from Section 5 of the Public Order Act. In the Committee on this Bill-a good five months after the close of the consultation-the Minister said that he hoped that at Report stage, the Government “will be able to put forward the Government’s considered view to the House”. Since then, the Government had a further five months to come to a decision, and yet-unless the Minister is going to make an announcement this evening-even at this stage, we still have not had a public announcement from the Government about their position, or about the findings and evidence from the consultation which your Lordships’ House has asked for.”

Committee says no to draft Communications Data Bill

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in CCDP, Civil Liberties, Communications Data Bill, Data Protection, Databases, Information Commissioner, Internet freedom, Mastering the Internet, Online privacy, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology | 8 Comments

The draft Communications Data Bill has today been roundly criticised by the committee of MPs and Peers, who make clear that the draft Bill is not fit for purpose and unacceptable in its current form. The report makes clear tinkering and minor changes are nowhere near enough – this draft bill is unacceptable to Parliament and if there is to be legislation, it is back to the drawing board for the Home Office.

Big Brother Watch gave oral evidence twice and submitted three pieces of written evidence. One of those submissions outlined the steps that could be taken, both with and without legislation, and we are pleased the committee has recognised this, urging the Home Office to do more to improve existing legal channels and for much more evidence on the problem to be produced. Consultation with industry and civil liberties groups, badly lacking before the draft bill, is an essential part of any legislation and the committee makes clear that they share this view.

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