“A person who lives in fear of anti-social behaviour, online harassment,
neighbourhood drug gangs or persistent nuisance calls is patently unable to
experience individual security or self-fulfilment.
The trust in strangers on which civilised society depends is eroded by a
perception that cyber fraud is prevalent, that rogue tradesmen prey on the old
with impunity or that paedophiles flourish in the privacy of their homes.
The threat of terrorist atrocities curtails normal activities, heightens suspicion,
promotes prejudice and can (as the terrorist may intend) do incalculable
damage to community relations.
A perception that the authorities are powerless to act against external threats
to the nation, or unable effectively to prosecute certain categories of crime
(including low-level crime), can result in hopelessness, a sense of injustice
and a feeling that the state has failed to perform its part of the bargain on
which consensual government depends.”246
9.5.
Each of the case studies which the Review team has considered is said to
represent a success, small or large, against serious crime or threats to national
security. They all involve intrusions, however technical, into the rights set out at
9.1 above. But as they also illustrate, the benefits of successful operations are
not simply measurable in a dry tally of operational gains. Individually and
cumulatively, they change lives for the better.
The sensitivity of bulk powers
9.6.
I have elsewhere described the question of whether the bulk collection and
retention of data are compatible with international privacy protections as “a
human rights issue in relation to this Bill that dwarfs all others”.247 That is
because:
(a) Bulk powers, by definition, involve potential access by the state to the data of
large numbers of people whom there is not the slightest reason to suspect of
threatening national security or engaging in serious crime.
(b) Any abuse of those powers could thus have particularly wide-ranging effects
on the innocent.
(c) Even the perception that abuse is possible, and that it could go undetected,
can generate a corrosive mistrust.
246
247
AQOT 3.8. The reference to low-level crime, important though its effects may be, is not
relevant to the powers under review. In recognition of their extensive nature, the Bill permits
them to be exercised only when there is a national security purpose or (in the case of BPDs) to
combat serious crime.
Oral evidence to the Joint Committee of Human Rights, HC 647, 9 March 2016, Q13.
120