[Infowarrior] - DPP chief Sir Ken Macdonald attacks Big Brother state surveillance

[Richard Forno]

 From Times Online
October 21, 2008
DPP chief Sir Ken Macdonald attacks Big Brother state surveillance
Frances Gibb, Legal Editor

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4984788.ece

The Director of Public Prosecutions has given a warning of the dangers  
of plans for a massive expansion of “Big Brother” state surveillance  
and of the growth of a “security state”.

Sir Ken Macdonald, who heads the Crown Prosecution Service, said that  
the “enormous powers of access to information” that technology had  
given the state should be used with great care.

He told an audience in London last night: “We need to take very great  
care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom’s back is broken  
by the relentless pressure of a security state.”

Technology, he added, was of critical importance to the struggle  
against serious crime and used wisely, could protect society.

It gave “the state enormous powers to access to knowledge and  
information about each one of us. And the ability to collect and store  
it at will; every second of every day, in everything we do.”

But Sir Ken, giving the inaugural Crown Prosecution Service lecture in  
London, called for “level-headedness and legislative restraint”.

He said: “We need to understand that it is in the nature of state  
power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how  
the state may use these powers, and to what extent are likely to be  
irreversible.

“They will be with us forever,” he said. “And they in turn will be  
built upon on.

“So we should take very great care to imagine the world we are  
creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we  
can’t bear.”

Sir Ken, who steps down at the end of this month after five years as  
Director of Public Prosecutions, did not refer directly to the latest  
Government surveillance plans.

But his comments will be taken to mean the Home Secretary Jacqui  
Smith's plans for a new “super database” that will allow Government  
officials to monitor people’s every online move.

The Government is examining ways to collect and store records of phone  
calls, e-mails and internet traffic. Without the right to monitor the  
flow of internet messaging, the police and security services would  
have to consider a “massive expansion of surveillance”, she said.

A three-month consultation is planned for the new year.

Sir Ken, who described his period as DPP as a “relentless  
prosecutorial struggle against terrorism”, acknowledged that the  
country faced “very significant risks.”

But he said he regarded people’s rights as priceless. The best way to  
face down security threats was to strengthen our institutions, rather  
than degrade them.

“Our struggle has been absolutely grounded in due process,” he added.  
“We all know that this has worked. Our conviction rates for terrorism  
cases is in excess of 90 per cent — unmatched in the fair trial world.”

He reminded his audience that when he took up his appointment, “some  
questioned my suitability on the grounds that I had, in my career at  
the Bar, defended terrorists of almost every hue.”

But he had made clear that his period of DPP and the “relentless  
struggle against terrorism” would be grounded in respect for  
historical norms and “for our liberal constitution”.

He added: “So we have been absolutely right to resist, whenever they  
have been suggested, special courts, vetted judges and all the other  
paraphernalia of paranoia.”

Earlier in his speech Sir Ken also gave warning about turning back the  
clock by giving back to the police the job of charging suspects.

There have been recent calls for a return to police charging on the  
ground that the role of the prosecutor in the process added to police  
red tape.

But the CPS’s role in charging, which was assumed under his period of  
office, made it “more likely that investigations will comply with the  
rules and that occasional abuses of police power will be avoided.

“We make it less likely that the state will bring cases which  
shouldn’t be brought and which are not justified by the evidence.”