Today, the government will publish its draft Investigatory Powers Bill, which will set out a comprehensive set of rules governing the powers of the security services and the police to probe our private communications and online activity. The detail of the bill will be important. Some of the powers may be new, but others will simply formally codify and regulate things government agencies do already. In advance of the bill, then, we've run through three key powers police and spies already have when investigating crimes and threats to security.Hack with impunity
In May of this year it emerged that the government had quietly amended the law governing hacking—the Computer Misuse Act 1990—to introduce an exemption for the police and security services. Law enforcement and spies can therefore hack phones, computers and other devices without breaking the law. Because the change was introduced as delegated legislation, there was no public debate on it at the time. Privacy International director Eric King said at the time that "hacking is one of the most intrusive surveillance capabilities available to any intelligence agency, and its use and safeguards surrounding it should be the subject of proper debate."
Snoop without judicial oversight
A 2014
report by Big Brother Watch found that police forces in the UK had authorised one "directed surveillance" operation every hour from 2010-12. These might include bugging or entering property; any action which is "covert but not intrusive." Police are authorised to do this under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and they generally only need authorisation from a senior police officer rather than a judge or other external arbiter. Police can only do this, though, if they can show the operation fulfils certain criteria, including being in the interests of preventing or detecting crime or protecting national security. The Big Brother Watch figures are important as they demonstrate how popular these powers are with police, who might be perceived as having more interest in "normal" people than spies do.
See who you've been talking to
Police put in requests for communications data—described as the "who, where and when," but not the content, of texts, phone calls, web searches and emails—733,237 times between 2012 and 2015, according to Big Brother Watch. To ask tech companies for such data, police need to get approval from within their own force. Some 96 per cent of these requests were approved. Big Brother Watch say that, even without police being able to access the content of our communications, such data "can paint a vivid and intrusive picture of our lives, including who our friends, family and work colleagues are, where we travel, live, work, socialise and holiday and the websites we visit online."
