IPCO Annual Report 2017
Findings
Law enforcement
5.21
The inspections revealed a generally high standard of compliance with the legislation, the
codes of practice and the guidance that was historically provided by the Office of Surveillance
Commissioners. These particular powers have been in place and inspected for approaching
20 years and the necessity and proportionality requirements are, generally speaking, well
understood. Few formal recommendations for the police or the other law enforcement
agencies were made in this context. In the main, these related to relatively minor areas such
as the need to provide a better explanation of the parameters of some of the authorisations,
along with the nature of activity to be undertaken, avoiding an unnecessarily complex and
technically obscure description of the equipment.
5.22
In updated guidance provided to practitioners in 2016 by the OSC, emphasis was placed on
the need to ensure there was a clear intelligence requirement to extend interference more
widely, as well as on the importance of engaging the Authorising Officer at an appropriate
stage to consider the necessity, proportionality and collateral interference of any additional
tactic. This guidance led to improvements in the detail provided in property interference
authorisations inspected in the following period.
Intelligence agencies
MI5 overall assessment
5.23
Because of their domestic focus, the majority of the s.5 authorisations inspected related
to MI5. The applications and renewals are completed to a high standard; this is in part due
to the close scrutiny they receive from the Warrant Granting Department.
5.24
There are, nonetheless, areas that would benefit from improvement. We identified an
instance where the NIO should have kept a more detailed record of the oral briefing
given to the Secretary of State whilst requesting a warrant under urgent conditions.
The Home Office’s written briefing notes, written by a senior official as a supplement to the
authorisation casework, should always accurately set out the key facts to enable a review
of them as freestanding documents. MI5 should avoid using boilerplate text in applications,
concentrating more clearly than at present on the circumstances of the individual case.
The limits of the agency’s understanding of a new target must be accurately described in
each application, avoiding standardised wording that can obscure the precise limits of their
knowledge.
SIS and GCHQ overall assessment
5.25
Although SIS & GCHQ completed s.5 applications to a good standard, the broader
applications by GCHQ should set out more clearly than at present the anticipated scale
of the activity and the likely intrusion.
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