A snooper’s charter

Wednesday August 3, 2011

The sheer volume of private data available to public bodies means that much will fall into the wrong hands, as is being shown by the hacking scandal. Eamonn Butler argues that the state’s power to snoop on us goes too far.

More public bodies are trying to get more private information about us. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act grants them their licence to snoop on us, and according to official figures, the demands from bodies like the police and local authorities for access to private email and telephone records have increased 10 per cent in the last two years. That amounts to over half a million requests this year – roughly one every minute of the day (and night).

But it gets worse. According to the Communications Commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy, around 1,700 of those applications were faulty. Which meant that the wrong people’s telephone numbers and email accounts were monitored – mostly by the security services, who were responsible for over half of the errors. In many cases, the fault was not that the wrong accounts were being eavesdropped, but that the eavesdropping request was not signed off by someone of sufficient rank.

You might say, as the communications czar does, that out of half a million requests, the error rate is small – though you may reasonably question why the authorities feel they have to monitor the private communications of half a million of us in the first place. Even so, it amounts to illegal snooping on innocent people. But we are all human, and we all make mistakes.

Quite. That is the problem with the powerful surveillance technology now at the command of the state. We are told that we are protected by ‘systems’ and ‘processes’ and ‘protocols’, but ultimately it is individual, fallible human beings who have the keys to it.

The problem is compounded when you reflect that, to be useful, surveillance and database information has to be available to a lot of people. What is the good of having a computerised patient medical record, for example, if only your local family doctor has access to it? The whole idea is that if you keel over somewhere on holiday, your records are readily on hand. But when you extend the number of people with access like this, it increases the number of people who might potentially abuse your data. That is how a group of junior hospital staff, for example, were able to access the medical details of a number of celebrities, purely for their own prurient interest.

Police officers, as we have seen, are willing to sell on people’s road accident details to claims lawyers. And there have been tip-offs to the newspapers, again involving celebrities, that cannot be explained by anything other than the abuse of private official data – something that is becoming more apparent every day as the hacking scandal unfolds. With the keys to so much of our data in so many people’s pockets, the possibility of blackmail must increase too.

And that is where I stand. If I really believed that public agencies could be trusted to protect my data and to use it fairly and responsibly and according to the law, I would have little concern about the database state. But state agencies are merely collections of employees, all fallible human beings with private interests of their own. And I wouldn’t trust them with my data any more than I would trust them to fill out the right telephone number on a surveillance request form.

Dr Eamonn Butler is director of the Adam Smith Institute