Britain is not an oppressive nation. Our security services exist to protect citizens and the state, rather than to protect the state from citizens. Terrorism is a great and growing threat to the British people. There is a good deal of evidence that GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 work tirelessly to thwart attacks on British soil and British interests. There is scant evidence, indeed, next to none, that they have worked to the detriment of the population at large. This makes us fortunate. Too few other countries can say the same.
The Investigatory Powers Bill, tabled in parliament yesterday is at its best a forward-thinking attempt to clarify precisely what the security services can, should, and need to do to best fulfil their role. Debates about the balance between privacy and national security may never end, but in the face of terrorist aggression there are strong arguments for prioritising the latter. Electronic communications are a powerful tool in the hands of terrorists. If the security services are powerless to scrutinise them, we all suffer.
The same bill, to put it mildly, is less convincing on the subject of domestic law enforcement. In draft form, published last year, it gave police forces enhanced abilities to hack private communications and to monitor the web history of the public when investigating “serious crimes”. Since then, police lobbying of the home secretary has clearly had an effect. The actual bill provides powers far broader.
Rather than only in the context of “serious crime”, hacking powers may now be used for the purpose of “mitigating any injury or damage to a person’s physical or mental health”. This can be authorised by a chief constable. Moreover, whereas the draft bill allowed police to see when members of the public had accessed a “red-flag” list of websites, including those providing social media, the new bill allows police to see a list of all websites visited. This is too much power, with too little scrutiny, in the hands of people with too poor a track record of trust.
Quite unlike the security services, there is a long and regrettable history of British police exploiting for other purposes powers that were designed to combat serious crime. The existing Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) has been used frequently to expose the sources of journalists reporting on the police themselves, most notoriously in the Metropolitan police’s investigation into The Sun newspaper’s reporting of the “Pleb- gate” scandal involving the MP Andrew Mitchell.
Advertisement
In 2013 Cumbria police arrested whistleblowers who had leaked details of the local crime commissioner’s expenses. The ability to impose police bail has been exploited to allow police to sidestep the rules about how long they can keep people in custody. Even the power of arrest itself has arguably been abused, with police keen to make a public show of activity in high-profile cases, or those involving celebrities.
Britain’s security services are known to use their powers discerningly. The same cannot be said about Britain’s police. The House of Commons should be wary of gifting them new powers requiring little oversight from anybody other than senior police officers. The home secretary, meanwhile, should not have jeopardised the vital preservation of national security by packaging it alongside new domestic powers that are almost certain to be abused.