Event Recap: Index debates the UK's "Snooper's Charter"

18 Oct 12 | Uncategorized

If passed, the UK’s draft Communications Data Bill — also known as the “Snooper’s Charter” — will make room for the blanket storage of information on British citizen’s emails, text messages and internet activity. Companies would have to collect data they don’t currently retain, and the Home Secretary would have the power to request communications equipment manufacturers install hardware to make spying easier.

With these concerns in mind Index hosted a panel on the bill today chaired by trustee John Kampfner, who was joined by Index CEO Kirsty Hughes, Demos’s Jamie Bartlett, Emma Ascroft of Yahoo and Ian Brown from Oxford University.

There was consensus over the bill’s red flags, particularly its broad language and wide extension of surveillance powers to anyone who provides telecommunications operating systems. This would include social networks and domain name registries.

For Yahoo’s Emma Ascroft, it was unclear what consideration the UK’s Home Office had given to jurisdiction boundaries. The broad nature of the bill means the UK would be the first country to extend its jurisdiction, creating a reserve power to “require UK providers to retain data that they could not obtain directly.” The Home Office has acknowledged, Ascroft said, that the UK would be the first country to extend its jurisdiction in this way, but added there will be a “tension” where UK citizens’ data is available to foreign law enforcement authorities. This would, she warned, lead to a “complex patchwork of overlapping laws”.

Of equal concern was them chilling effect the bill could have if passed, as Index CEO Kirsty Hughes described:

It risks undermining anonymity, particularly whistleblowing, if user data can be tracked and comprehensively collected.

But despite conceding no other democracies had gone as far as the UK proposes to go, Jamie Bartlett felt the bill didn’t go far enough. Emphatic that he was “in favour of regulated, transparent and clear powers of surveillance”, he said there were far greater problems posed by the ability of the government to access open source social media content, which is currently not covered by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Writing for Index today, Bartlett said:

This type of widespread, mass social media monitoring needs to regulated, limited, and put on a legal footing.

Yet the fact that the bill is not subject to judicial oversight, combined with the prospect of a backstop power, worried some. For Oxford University’s Ian Brown, the latter went to “the heart of proportionality”, which Index and other rights groups have flagged as one of the bill’s greatest flaws.

“The Home Office has to come out of its comfort zone,” Ascroft concluded, pointing to internal conflict over the bill. “The Foreign Office, justice department, culture department, they all have anxieties.”

While she predicted the bill would be amended, Hughes suggested there was  a risk this would not go far enough. “We need the UK’s voice out there defending digital freedom,” she said.

The joint committee on the bill is due to report on 30 November.

Written evidence to the draft bill has been collated here

Index’s own submission is available here

Jimmy Savile, power and libel

05 Oct 12 | Uncategorized

Allegations about the late Jimmy Savile’s abuse of young girls have led to a curious binary set of reactions. On the one hand, we are shocked and appalled. On the other hand, we knew all along.

There were always rumours, of course. Journalist Lynn Barber, in a 1990 interview, put the allegation to Savile: “What people say is that you like little girls.”

But a mixture of fear of privacy and libel laws, and the censorious pressure that prominent, well-connected figures can impose not just on weak and insecure young girls and their families, meant the rumours were never properly confronted. Even the BBC’s Newsnight would not broadcast the allegations .

Former tabloid editor Brian Hitchen wrote yesterday that England’s libel laws “too often help make those like Savile untouchable.”

Even now, the threat of libel suits could hang over newspapers seeking to further investigate allegations made by women who testified in ITV’s documentary about Savile.  

The law should not be a tool for the powerful to silence the weak. And this is all about power: men over women, celebrity over the unknown, rich over poor.

As more stories emerge about the likes of Savile and Gary Glitter, I cannot help but compare it with  the widespread clerical abuse that gripped the state of Ireland for many years. The enormity of this child Gulag has been revealed in a series of official reports in the past few years, with grim testimony given as victims finally found a space where they could speak of their experiences.

The reaction to those reports was revulsion. But it came from that same place of knowing and not knowing as the reaction to the Savile story. There cannot have been a person in Ireland who did not know that the church covered up child abuse. But we were reassured that they were bad apples, and it felt wrong to complain when there were so many good priests who did so much for our spiritual and physical wellbeing.

Savile pulled the same trick. How could you attack a man who did so much for the community?

In even the worst totalitarian regime, rumours about the rulers can circulate below the censor’s radar. But it’s only when we can proclaim, on the record and with confidence, our doubts about the rich, famous and powerful, that we can actually bring about change.

Padraig Reidy is News Editor of Index on Censorship

More on libel:

Why it’s vital that the government act to protect free speech
Five ludicrous libel cases
Last chance to sign our petition to reform libel laws that stifle debate, curtail criticism and even endanger lives