The Growth in the Work
8. When I began in my post in April 2000, in the immediate wake of RIPA and
the Human Rights Act, I had the nine Agencies and organisations empowered
lawfully to intercept communications under section 6 of RIPA. Since then, as
outlined in my previous Reports, I have, at the request of the Home Secretary,
undertaken the inspection of interception in prisons, and on 5 January 2004
Chapter II of Part I of RIPA came into force enabling named organisations
approved by Parliament to acquire communications data. The acquisition of
communications data, although important and an extremely powerful and
effective investigative tool, is not as intrusive as the interception of
communications themselves. As at the date of this Report the number of
organisations that I am required to inspect and oversee are as follows:
a.
The nine Agencies as indicated above.
b.
52 police forces.
c.
12 other Law Enforcement Agencies such as the Royal Military Police and
the British Transport Police.
d.
139 prisons.
e.
475 local authorities authorised to acquire communications data.
f.
108 other organisations such as the Financial Services Authority, the
Serious Fraud Office, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the
Ambulance Service and the Fire Service who are authorised to acquire
communications data.
totalling 795 in all.
9. In addition I visit the principal Communications Service Providers in this
field as reported below. The overall result of these additions is that the work of
the Commissioner has changed and grown out of all recognition since I took up
my post in April 2000. A new oversight regime is in place to deal with the
increased workload, with the Commissioner retaining overall oversight, and I
think I can report that the regime has settled down well and that proper oversight
is already in place and working well. I deal more fully with this below.
10. It will be immediately apparent to any reader of this Report that it would be
impossible for a single Commissioner to inspect and report on all these
organisations on his own. Some inspections are quite lengthy, occasionally
running to several days, and full Reports have to be prepared for each authority
inspected. Accordingly it was agreed with the Home Secretary that a Chief
Inspector and the necessary number of inspectors would be recruited to carry out
the bulk of the inspections in prisons and under Chapter II in respect of the
acquisition and disclosure of communications data given the potential for
intrusion into privacy albeit of a lesser kind than is the case in respect of
communications content. All oversight under Chapter I continues to be carried
out by the Commissioner alone. A recruitment exercise was undertaken through
my sponsoring department, the Home Office. A recruitment agency was
instructed, and there were a very large number of applicants. The applications had
to be sifted and assessments made. This took a considerable time. Following the
assessment, a number of applicants were interviewed by a panel of three,
consisting of myself and two senior Members of the Home Office (the Head of
my sponsor unit and an independent assessor). A Chief Inspector and five
Inspectors were chosen, all with relevant experience from working in law
enforcement or the private sector of using or interpreting communications data
in criminal investigations and proceedings. The Chief Inspector was in post on
16 May 2005 and the remainder of the team joined between that date and
4 September 2005. Thereafter it was necessary for them to be trained in this work
which included attendance at a residential course and the inspections commenced
in the latter part of 2005. I will return to this aspect of the work later in
this Report.
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