To follow on from a couple of recent posts (Sins of Commission and Policy and Technology evolve at different rates), I see that the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) has ruled against the UK government in a case about phone tapping. Civil Rights campaigners including the UK Liberty group (as opposed to the Liberty Alliance) brought the case in 1999 to complain about the 1985 Interception of Communications Act. It's taken 9 years to get a ruling to the effect that that Act conferred "very wide discretion [...] on the State to intercept and examine" communications, and that this was not balanced by adequate protection against the abuse of those powers.
The interceptions in question related specifically to communication between the UK mainland and Ireland, and were operated by the MoD (Ministry of Defence). The Director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties said the ruling found that "the UK's relatively sophisticated rules on data interception have failed to prevent unlawful interference with privacy rights".
Since the action was brought, the 1985 Act has been replaced by the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), and I believe it was in 1998-99 that the offices of Surveillance Commissioner and Interception of Communications Commissioner were establshed (though if you know better, please leave a comment). I suspect that one response open to the government, then, is simply to maintain that any shortcomings of 1985-1999 have been addressed by the new legislative and regulatory measures put in place between then and now. As I understand it, though, RIPA confers far wider powers than the ICA did... (witness the extent to which RIPA, unlike the ICA, is used not so much to mount surveillance on IRA bomb cells, but to monitor that other offshore menace - people who clam-pick from unauthorised beds...).
At any rate, at that point I started to wonder; has the UK's governance regime for intercepted communications become more, or less 'sophisticated' since that time, and are we more, or less open to unlawful interference with privacy rights than we were then? The privacy and civil rights campaigners seem to wonder the same thing; they are calling for the current rules to be re-examined in the light of the ECHR case.
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