2013 Annual Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner
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authority), but is closely prescribed by the Code of Practice;
the application of individual selection criteria initially derived from a section
8(4) interception warrant is also determined internally to the interception
agency by properly structured internal procedures, backed up by independent
audit arrangements;
convinced, as I am, that the main structure for section 8(4) warrants has
statutory structural integrity and that it is in fact operated lawfully and so
as to avoid disproportionate intrusion into privacy, I nevertheless need to
investigate further the breadth and depth of the internal procedures that are
being applied to ensure that they are sufficiently strong in all respects.
6.6.10 Risk of unlawful intrusion? The second question under this main heading as to
whether there is any real risk that the interception agencies or somebody might be able
to intrude unlawfully into people’s privacy needs further analysis. Conceivably possible
candidates for effecting such unlawful intrusion could be:
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the Government;
one or more of the interception agencies themselves;
one or more rogue individuals within the interception agencies; or
by means of aggressive external cyber attack.
6.6.11 The Government. There is, in my judgment, no risk that the Government
would or could require the interception agencies to undertake activity which would be
unlawful under RIPA 2000 Part I. I ask the question only to dismiss it, but also because I
understand that relevant questionable activity may have happened in the United States
in the 1970’s16.
6.6.12 Successive Secretaries of State have undertaken their statutory functions of
granting warrants under RIPA 2000 Part I Chapter I conscientiously, with complete
integrity in the public interest, and without any partisan motive which the lawful subject
matter would never embrace anyway.
6.6.13 Secretaries of State do not initiate applications for interception warrants. They
respond to applications from the interception agencies which are intended to support
their operations. Some of these operations are in general response to intelligence policy
priorities of the Joint Intelligence Committee, but these cannot and do not translate into
interception applications which are outside the Chapter I statutory necessity purposes.
6.6.14 The Interception Agencies. Unlawful and unwarranted intercept intrusion
of any kind, let alone “massive unwarranted surveillance”, is not and, in my judgment
could not be carried out institutionally within the interception agencies themselves. The
interception agencies and all their staff are quite well aware of the lawful limits of their
powers. Any form of massive unwarranted intercept intrusion would as a minimum
require a significant unlawful internal conspiracy which would never go undetected,
16 See pages 54 to 63 of the Report to President Obama discussed in paragraphs 5.4 and 5.5 of this report.
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