CHAPTER 9: LAW ENFORCEMENT
investigation, allowing a more targeted approach to those involved in the most serious
criminality, and ensuring that those who adopt advanced encryption technologies
remain within the reach of the law. For their part, the police consider that, in an
increasingly cyber-enabled environment, the need for them to use CNE is inevitable.
9.76.
A debate is clearly needed as to how law enforcement can best utilise CNE and what
safeguards should apply.
Minor users
9.77.
Local authorities are treated as the poor relations of law enforcement. They have to
operate with a more elaborate authorisation procedure (after some well-publicised
instances of the self-authorised use of surveillance powers in circumstances that
seemed disproportionate).51 Yet they manage large areas of responsibility, including
tenancy fraud, benefit fraud and e-crime in the trading standards context, with
diminished resources and fewer powers than most other public authorities.
9.78.
Three issues arise in relation to the local authorities and the other minor users of RIPA
communications data powers (as defined at 9.3 above):
(a)
Who should have the powers?
(b)
What powers should they have?
(c)
What about non-RIPA powers?
Who should have the powers?
9.79.
9.80.
51
52
53
Not every public authority with powers to request communications data uses those
powers. Indeed IOCCO reports that:
(a)
40% of the public authorities that have powers to acquire communications data
have never used their powers. These are largely district councils which will
have had access to non-RIPA powers for their benefit fraud functions that are
now transferring to DWP; and that
(b)
of the 13 public authorities which had their powers removed in February 2015,52
only four had never used them and the remaining nine had collectively
approved 103 applications for communications data in 2014.53
The minor users from which I have heard all wish to maintain their powers. In common
with the police, they find that only the use of communications data allows them to
identify subjects in some cases:
Directed surveillance, in particular, appears to have been used in relation to dog fouling, school
catchment areas and the misuse of a disabled parking badge: “Spy law ‘used in dog fouling war”, BBC
News website, 27 April 2008. Both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat manifestos in 2010
contained commitments to curb councils’ powers.
SI 2015/228.
IOCC Report, (March 2015), para 7.10.
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