Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Annual Report 2019
Warrants and authorisations
19.6
The following table gives total numbers for the warrants and authorisations issued, given,
considered and approved for the period 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2019. It also
provides the total number of certain notifications made to IPCO during this period.
19.7
In our 2018 report, we did not include figures for the number of warrants and
authorisations considered, in addition to those granted, where there was a period of
transition in relation to that power. For example, targeted interception was only subject
to judicial consideration in the latter half of 2018 and so we did not identify how many
warrant applications had been considered during that period. This was omitted to prevent
providing misleading partial statistics. We have taken the same approach in the table below
for any powers that transitioned during 2019. However, we are now able to give a fuller
picture of the work done by IPCO and the Office for Communications Data Authorisations
(OCDA), as set out below. As noted in previous chapters, any application that has not been
granted after consideration will have been refused or withdrawn. This could have been the
result of judicial challenge or to changes in the planned operation by the requesting agency.
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