[Infowarrior] - Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public

[Richard Forno]

October 25, 2009
Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public
By SARAH LYALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/world/europe/25surveillance.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
POOLE, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a  
“surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every  
corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and  
the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.

A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed  
Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and  
surveillance, on a par with Singapore.

But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of  
three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of  
falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood  
school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation.  
They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three  
weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly  
followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three  
children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her  
daughters and their car).

It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules. Her daughter was  
admitted to the school. But she has not let the matter rest. Her case,  
now scheduled to be heard by a regulatory tribunal, has become  
emblematic of the struggle between personal privacy and the ever more  
powerful state here.

The Poole Borough Council, which governs the area of Dorset where Ms.  
Paton lives with her partner and their children, says it has done  
nothing wrong.

In a way, that is true: under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate  
surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents  
secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers —  
which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law  
enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally  
dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare  
benefits.

But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and  
people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use  
them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash  
out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people  
whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.

“Does our privacy mean anything?” Ms. Paton said in an interview. “I  
haven’t had a drink for 20 years, but there is nothing that has  
brought me closer to drinking than this case.”

The law in question is known as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers  
Act, or RIPA, and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies  
— including the Ambulance Service and the Charity Commission — powers  
once held by only a handful of law enforcement and security service  
organizations.

Under the law, the localities and agencies can film people with hidden  
cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and  
Web site visits and enlist undercover “agents” to pose, for example,  
as teenagers who want to buy alcohol.

In a report this summer, Sir Christopher Rose, the chief surveillance  
commissioner, said that local governments conducted nearly 5,000  
“directed surveillance missions” in the year ending in March and that  
other public authorities carried out roughly the same amount.

Local officials say that using covert surveillance is justified. The  
Poole Borough Council, for example, used it to detect and prosecute  
illegal fishing in Poole Harbor.

“RIPA is an essential tool for local authority enforcement which we  
make limited use of in cases where it is proportionate and there are  
no other means of gathering evidence,” Tim Martin, who is in charge of  
legal and democratic services for Poole, which is southwest of London,  
said in a statement.

The fuss over the law comes against a backdrop of widespread public  
worry about an increasingly intrusive state and the growing  
circulation of personal details in vast databases compiled by the  
government and private companies.

“Successive U.K. governments have gradually constructed one of the  
most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in  
the world,” the House of Lords Constitution Committee said in a recent  
report. It continued: “The development of electronic surveillance and  
the collection and processing of personal information have become  
pervasive, routine and almost taken for granted.”

The Lords report pointed out that the government enacted the law in  
the first place to provide a framework for a series of scattershot  
rules on surveillance. The goal was also to make such regulations  
compatible with privacy rights set out in the European Convention on  
Human Rights.

RIPA is a complicated law that also regulates wiretapping and  
intrusive surveillance carried out by the security services. But faced  
with rumbles of public discontent about local governments’ behavior,  
the Home Office announced in the spring that it would review the  
legislation to make it clearer what localities should be allowed to do.

“The government has absolutely no interest in spying on law-abiding  
people going about their everyday lives,” Jacqui Smith, then home  
secretary, said.

One of the biggest criticisms of the law is that the targets of  
surveillance are usually unaware that they have been spied on.

Indeed, Ms. Paton learned what had happened only later, when officials  
summoned her to discuss her daughter’s school application. To her  
shock, they produced the covert surveillance report and the family’s  
telephone billing records.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re within their rights to scrutinize  
all applications, but the way they went about it was totally  
unwarranted,” Ms. Paton said. “If they’d wanted any information, they  
could have come and asked.”

She would have explained that her case was complicated. The family was  
moving from their old house within the school district to a new one  
just outside it. But they met the residency requirements because they  
were still living at the old address when school applications closed.

At the meeting, Ms. Paton and her partner, Tim Joyce, pointed out that  
the surveillance evidence was irrelevant because the surveillance had  
been carried out after the deadline had passed.

“They promptly ushered us out of the room,” she said. “As I stood  
outside the door, they said, ‘You go and tell your friends that these  
are the powers we have.’ ”

Soon afterward, their daughter was admitted to the school. Ms. Paton  
began pressing local officials on their surveillance tactics.

“I said, ‘I want to come in and talk to you,’ ” she said. “ ‘How many  
people were in the car? Were they men or women? Did they take any  
photos? Does this mean I have a criminal record?’ ”

No one would answer her questions, Ms. Paton said.

Mr. Martin said he could not comment on her case because it was under  
review. But Ms. Paton said the Office of the Surveillance  
Commissioners, which monitors use of the law, found that the Poole  
council had acted properly. “They said my privacy wasn’t intruded on  
because the surveillance was covert,” she said.

The case is now before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which looks  
into complaints about RIPA. It usually meets in secret but has agreed,  
Ms. Paton said, to have an open hearing at the beginning of November.

The whole process is so shrouded in mystery that few people ever take  
it this far. “Because no one knows you have a right to know you’re  
under surveillance,” Ms. Paton said, “nobody ever makes a complaint.”