Comment Articles

RIPA: Catching terrorists by watching you

Matt Loney ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 17 Jul 2002 08:49 BST

In two weeks, law enforcement agencies will be able to obtain a warrant that will let them snoop on almost every piece of digital data that passes through an ISP in the UK.

That means that in addition to tracking which Web sites an individual visits, law enforcement officers will be able to read that individual's emails and faxes. When these new powers were being written into the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the then home secretary, Jack Straw, said they were being introduced to bring the tapping of digital communications into line with telephone and mail interception.

Interception of digital communications had to be legislated on for two reasons, we were told. First, companies were at the time intercepting the employee emails and phone calls as well as tracking the Web sites they visit almost as a matter of course. While phone call monitoring was and is already governed by legislation, there were no laws governing interception of emails and tracking of Internet use. The RIP Act, together with the updated Data Protection Act (1998), addressed these dichotomies, even if they did not clarify them.

But the real reason for the RIP Act, we were told, was to catch criminals: we're talking terrorists and organised criminals here.

However, two recent developments give the lie to this argument and demonstrate that the government is not as interested in the private lives of terrorists as it is in the private lives of regular individuals.

In June we discovered that the Home Office, now under the control of David Blunkett, was to introduce a statutory instrument that would expand beyond the expectations of even the most paranoid privacy campaigners the list of government departments that could obtain warrants to snoop on your communications.