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- The Observer,
- Sunday November 18 2001
Is there something in the water supply at Queen Anne's Gate, headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, aka the Home Office?
I ask because in recent times every occupant of the post of Home Secretary has been subject to paranoid delusions, especially in matters related to the internet.
Jack Straw was certifiable on the subject by the time he was carted off to the Foreign Office, but before that happened he had pushed through the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), an odious statute that gave sweeping - and effectively unsupervised - powers to the authorities to snoop on the email communications and online activities of UK subjects. (I was going to say 'citizens', but that would, of course, be constitutionally inaccurate.)
Ripa, remember, is the law that empowers the Home Secretary to require an internet service provider to feed a copy of every packet that flows through its servers to a special monitoring centre at MI5 headquarters in London.
And for those with the temerity to think that encrypting email is a way of keeping the Home Secretary out of their inboxes, Ripa is the statute that compels them to hand over the decryption keys to Inspector Knacker or face two years in the slammer.
It also has a neat provision that can get you five years' imprisonment should you inform your spouse why Knacker is dragging you off to the station for failing to provide said keys.
Having bequeathed Ripa to the nation, Straw was replaced by D Blunkett, who was already a grade A control freak before he started drinking the water at Queen Anne's Gate. Blunkett pondered Ripa and decided that it had two serious defects.
The first was that it limited the exercise of his snooping powers to certain classes of investigation - detection of terrorism, serious crime, national security or the economic well-being of the UK, for example.
The second was that it only enabled real-time monitoring of communications, whereas what control freaks really desire is the accumulation of surveillance data that can then be trawled through retrospectively.
This kind of 'data warehousing' was what the spooks wanted at the time Ripa was going through Parliament, but the Home Office judged that even New Labour MPs might gag at such an Orwellian twist and denounced rumours about warehousing as the ravings of conspiracy theorists.
But guess what? Clause 102 of Blunkett's new anti-terrorism legislation contains measures enabling him to compel ISPs to stockpile all their logs of customer activities. And the Guardian has now established that the archived data will be available not just for anti-terrorist investigations, but also for tax collection and public health & safety purposes.
According to the Foundation for Information Policy Research, the 'traffic data' that Blunkett wants to accumulate and monitor constitutes 'a near complete map of private life: who everyone talks to [by email and phone], where everyone goes [mobile phone location co-ordinates], and what everyone reads online [websites browsed].
'Current mobile phones track location to a few hundred metres while the phone is switched on [not merely when a call is made], and third-generation phones will pinpoint location to a few metres.'
Blunkett's proposals amount to infringement of basic civil liberties and human rights on a truly Orwellian scale. And the obscene thing is that they are being railroaded through under cover of a 'war' to defend the values of liberal democracy against the depredations of terrorism.
Welcome to the National Security state.
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