Secret justice is no justice at all

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Judicial review | Leave a comment

“Secret trials and non-disclosure of evidence are potential characteristics of repressive regimes and undemocratic societies.”

So said Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, president of the Law Society of England and Wales, and Michael Todd QC, chairman of the Bar Council, in a letter to Government ministers responsible for the Justice and Security Bill on Saturday.

The Bill is now in the Lords for its second reading, and today the Daily Mail has called on the Lords to “halt this draconian plan”.

We wholeheartedly support both statements.

Prime Minister misses the point on judicial reviews

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Emma Carr Posted in Home, Judicial review, Legal Action | 1 Comment

David Cameron has announced plans to build a “leaner, faster” government, by means of a shakeup of the judicial review process. Rather than focusing on creating a system that would hold public decisions to account, the Prime Minister has promised to crack down on “time wasting” caused by the “massive growth industry” in legal challenges to government policy.

The stats speak from themselves: the number of judicial review applications used to challenge a decision by a public body has risen from 160 in 1975 to 11,200 in 2011. However, last year applications were five times more likely to be refused than granted.

The Prime Minister placed reforms to the judicial process at the center of his plans to ensure Britain can compete globally. The proposals include cutting the three month time limit on applying for a review and charging more “so people think twice about time-wasting”, however how much “more” is currently unclear. Currently, a fee of £60 is payable when permission for the application is lodged and a further £215 is payable if permission is granted. Legal costs can then run up to tens of thousands of pounds.

A recent example of a judicial review is the case of the West Coast rail franchise which saw Virgin Rail successfully overturn the Department for Transport decision to award the contract to FirstGroup. Another successful example is the legal challenge launched by Friends of The Earth on the Government’s plans to cut solar tariff incentives.

The Government appear to be missing the point; the process should be about speed and efficiency not making it harder to make a claim. Perhaps, rather than focusing on people and organisations causing unnecessary delays, the Government should be introducing what is currently lacking; proper checks to hold public decisions to account.

The alternatives to the draft Communications Data Bill

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in CCDP, Communications Data Bill, Databases, Information Commissioner, Internet freedom, Online privacy, Surveillance, Technology, Terrorism Legislation | 1 Comment

The internet has clearly changed the way we communicate, and of course criminals are utilising the same technology we do to communicate with one another.

Big Brother Watch has submitted supplementary evidence to the Joint Committee on the draft Communications Data Bill highlighting the alternatives and opportunities available. The draft Bill, which would require details of our every email, website visit and social media log to be recorded, is currently under review from a specially convened joint committee of MPs and Peers.

We believe far more could be done without recording the online activity of every citizen and this post summarises our evidence to the comittee.

Putting a price on our data

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in CCDP, Communications Data Bill, Data Protection, Europe, Information Commissioner, Internet freedom, Online privacy, Privacy, Web blocking | 5 Comments

A new report by Boston Consulting Group on behalf of Liberty Global has attempted to answer the question we often ask – how much is our personal data worth?

We’ve previously warned that with free services, consumers are no longer the customer – they are the product, to be monitored, profiled and sold on. With 96% of Google’s $37.9bn revenue in 2011 coming from advertising and Facebook’s advertising revenue in Q3 2012 reaching $1.086bn, the value of our data has been the oil to the digital revolution.

According to the report, the value extracted from European consumers’ personal data were worth €315bn in 2011 and has the potential to grow to nearly €1tn annually in 2020. That’s nearly 8% of European GDP.

Hardly surprising that the lobbying efforts against greater privacy protection are well funded. One of the main findings was that if users understood what data was being captured and why, and if they could see direct personal benefit, they were willing to hand over their data. The problem is at present consumers simply don’t have that knowledge or the legal protection to ensure they have a choice.

The danger is that without strong consumer protection and competitive markets, privacy is at risk from dominant or monopolistic companies reliant on ever increasing volumes of data about us – and with little to deter them from over-stepping the mark.

We should also not underestimate the power of these commercial interests in lobbying to regulate or outlaw privacy-enhancing technology, particularly where those commercial interests coincide with Government moves towards increased surveillance online. Russia’s plans to outlaw anonymous web-browsing will not only undermine the rights of users and allow the Government to control what citizens see online, but it will also help corporate interests reliant on data maintain their market position.

Why consumers need choice to protect their privacy

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Home | Leave a comment

Writing on Huffington Post business, I outline why it’s not enough to have strong data protection laws to protect privacy – we need competitive markets too.

As the digital revolutions continues to fueled in a large part by advertising spending, a data arms race is emerging, with a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations engaged in a battle to know more about us — and therefore better target adverts — than their competitors.

This race to the bottom, where respecting consumer privacy is an obstacle to greater profit is the stark reality of a digital world where services are free and data is valuable. We are not customers, but a product, to be repackaged and marketed to the highest bidder.

In March this year, perhaps the single most important test for this balance began. Google, in what was purported to be a simplification of their existing product-specific privacy policies, a new, all-encompassing policy was implemented, despite a request from European data protection regulators for more time to assess the impact for consumer privacy.

The silo-walls came down, with a tsunami of information released across Google’s operations.

The time has come for privacy and competition regulators to act together, recognizing that it is essential for consumers not only to be fully informed about what happens to their data, but to have a real choice of service and on what terms those services are offered.

You can read the piece here.

Pick a number, any number – Home Office scramble to justify web snooping

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in CCDP, Civil Liberties, Communications Data Bill, Information Commissioner, Online privacy, Surveillance, Technology | Leave a comment

Yesterday in Parliament we heard further questioning of the Home Secretary about the evidence base for the draft Communications Data Bill.

The Home Secretary told the Joint Committee that of the 30,000 estimated cases last year where the police made an urgent request for communications data, between 25% and 40% of them resulted in lives being saved.

Let’s do the maths.

25% of 30,000 is 7,500 lives, so we can assume the Home Secretary was talking about a figure in the region of 10,000 lives.

The latest figures for murder are 550 between 2011-12, to put this into perspective.

Our own work under Freedom of Information law has found that police forces do not centrally log the kinds of offences they use communications data for, however one force did give us data and the requests included investigations into “other non-crime, traffic offences, theft and burglary.

What is not clear is why, given the Home Office have been working on this plan for nearly a decade, has there not been any effort to record how forces currently use communications data to inform the legislative proposals?

Indeed, quite what evidence the figure of 10,000 is based on is unclear. Of these, an awful lot will be emergency services looking up the location a 999 call is being made from. (And as far as we’re aware no suggestion has been made that these kind of calls are diverting to online communications.) It’s right emergency services can access data when they need to for 999 calls, however to say that using communications data is the only way to get that location information is misleading to say the least.

In evidence from Home Office officials, it also emerged that the Home Office has used a figure of £1.7m per life saved to estimate the benefits of the bill. The Chairman of the Committee picked up on this evaluation, questioning the overall benefits figure as “fanciful”.

Of course, we have been here before. Speaking after the collapse of another Home Office scheme, then Minister Tony McNulty said: “Perhaps in the past the government, in its enthusiasm, oversold the advantages of identity cards. We did suggest, or at least implied, that they might well be a panacea for identity fraud, for benefit fraud, terrorism, entitlement and access to public services.”

Public don’t trust Snoopers’ Charter and say it’s a waste of money

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in CCDP, Civil Liberties, Communications Data Bill, Databases, Information Commissioner, Internet freedom, Mastering the Internet, Online privacy, Surveillance, Technology | 9 Comments

Today Big Brother Watch has published new research showing just how little support the Home Office’s draft Communications Data bill has.

You can read our briefing on the bill here and why we don’t think it’s right the Government passes a law requiring data to be stored about everyone’s communications.

Witnesses have lined up to tell the specially established Joint Committee investigating the draft bill how the legislation is a risk to economic growth, innovation, cyber security, foreign policy, not to mention the privacy and civil liberties of every British citizen. From our research, conducted with YouGov, it is clear the public are not content with having their every email, social media message, website visit and online conversation’s logged and stored.

Despite rhetoric reminiscent of ID Cards and 90 day detention, just 6% of people think the Government has made a clear and compelling argument for the draft Communications Data Bill.

Regulate data, not the press, to protect privacy Mr Leveson

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Data Protection, Freedom of Expression, Information Commissioner | 4 Comments

The long-awaited inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics of the British press” being run by Lord Leveson is nearing completion, and rumblings of a proposal to regulate the press are beginning to surface.

Let us be clear – a free press is a fundamental part of a democratic society. From bloggers to broadsheets, the idea that the state should be able to decide who gets to publish is entirely at odds with the essential role the press plays in holding the state and authority to account.

We entirely agree with Eric Pickles MP and Boris Johnson, to name but a few who have spoken out against the idea of Parliament passing a new law to regulate the press.

In our evidence to the Leveson enquiry, we made a simple argument against statutory regulation of the press. Everything that has led to the Leveson enquiry is already punishable under criminal law.

From phone hacking to blagging information from public and private organisations, those people intentionally acquiring information they did not have the right to access are already committing a a criminal offence. The fact that the Information Commissioner is woefully short of powers and that it is still not a criminal offence to breach Section 55 of the Data Protection Act (something we, the Information Commissioner and two Parliamentary committees have called for) are clearly troubling, but it would be far better to fix these shortcomings than to try and capture our entire media in a splurge of regulation. Quite how it would even work in an internet age is far from clear.

For those individuals in a public body selling information, there is the offence of misconduct in public office. Only a few weeks ago did a senior Metropolitan Police figure appear in court charged exactly with this offence after allegedly selling information to the News of The World.

Yes, we need to protect people’s privacy and personal information. To do that, you regulate how and when information is collected, and what happens to it after it is collected. Whether it is an insurance company checking out previous illnesses, a private investigator working on a divorce settlement or a journalist investigating which politicians are abusing their expenses, all of those situations require better protections of the data in the first place. To single out the journalist as a special case undermines the wider ambition to protect privacy and puts our media in a precarious position.

The only benefactors of such a state of affairs would be those who seek to abuse their power and avoid accountability. We must not allow this to happen.

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