RIPA

Today we can explore an inexplicable contradiction. On the one hand there is the media uproar about Google Earth and their unfolding photo mapping of every one of our streets.

On the other hand there are the local councils using the RIPA laws to enforce laws it was never intended for. I don’t understand why people are upset about a mapping picture of their home but are not upset about someone spying on their lives.

RIPA is the name of the British law designed to help counter terrorism. According to the Home Office arm of the British Government The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to give it the full name legislates for using methods of surveillance and information gathering to help the prevention of crime, including terrorism.

RIPA makes provision for:
* the interception of communications
* the acquisition and disclosure of data relating to communications
* the carrying out of surveillance
* the use of covert human intelligence sources
* access to electronic data protected by encryption or passwords
* the appointment of Commissioners and the establishment of a tribunal with jurisdiction to oversee these issues.

One British council, Walsall, in the British midlands, has apparently used the RIPA powers 916 times since these were recently introduced. What a den of terrorism and threats to our state there must be in this otherwise insignificant corner of Britain! Let’s examine some of these examples of terrible danger being controlled by this new catchall legislation.

They all basically fall within the area of surveillance operations and include spying on a council employee who has been off work with a back problem for a lengthy period, to see if he is really sick, or is claiming benefits but is not deserving. I can see why the man might be naughty, even wicked, but a threat to our national security? It turns out that this was, in any event, a case of a mistaken identity, and the man really did have a bad back and as a consequence is still employed by the council who was spying on him.

The council is happy and content to publicly admit that the vast majority of the more than 900 cases of it using this power to snoop were its attempts to spy on suspected benefit fraudsters, trading standard infringements and anti-social behavior.

In another shocking example of the abuse of the powers taking place, there is Poole council, on the sunny Southern Coast of England. A family was spied upon for three weeks to confirm by the council to check whether the family lived within the catchments area of a school that they were seeking to send their daughter to.

Other councils have been inserting hidden cameras in their refuse bins to check whether their residents are over stuffing their bins, or not sorting their rubbish appropriately. This amounts to hundreds of thousands of bins.

This is a flagrant abuse of the RIPA laws which were not designed so that a nameless and faceless bureaucrat in a council office, with no appropriate training as a security officer, and no real vetting, could spy on people who have done nothing more than be suspected of over filling their waste bin, or fiddled their claim or made a noise. Those examples should be dealt with by the police and not by unqualified and incompetent twits abusing the power of the law against the common man and woman.

At the same time as these affronts and breaches of our liberty we have many people becoming genuinely upset because there will be pictures of their streets and houses on maps! How can they be so upset about this and so supine and unconcerned when civil freedoms are being eroded on a daily basis with barely a protest or even a whimper? Perhaps it’s because of who is introducing these laws and how it’s being done. There were no big announcements that this perfidious and unfair law was going to be used in this manner. If Maggie Thatcher had tried to bring in laws like these the left leaning, so called liberals would have rioted on our streets. But since New Labour’s seemingly soft and fluffy government introduced these misguided laws no one realized what was happening. This is not an example of the much disliked nanny state people commonly dislike, this is Stalinism writ large.

Let us remind ourselves that the RIPA laws were introduced to enhance the investigatory powers in the interests of national security.

The town halls of the UK argue that their full use of this law, including enhanced surveillance via CCTV is of benefit to the law abiding amongst us. Their argument being that if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear from being spied upon. What about our privacy? What about our right to be considered innocent until we’re proven guilty of some offence? What about being told what we’re accused of? What about big brother being told to sod off, who needs this erosion of our liberty that we once, very recently, took for granted? Why don’t Her Government’s opposition, the Conservative Party, pledge right now to rid us of this terrible abuse of power when they win the next election?