Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner - July 2016
and Belhadj and Others vs. the Security Service, SIS, GCHQ, Home Office and FCO) and in
light of draft amendments that were made to the Code of Practice.
6.76 Overall we found good progress against the recommendations we made in
2014. In particular we welcomed the introduction of additional signing slots with the
secretaries of state during recess periods, improvements in the timescales within which
instruments, modifications and cancellations are served on CSPs, the implementation of
the recommendations relating to the retention, storage and destruction of intercepted
material and related communications data, and those relating to collateral intrusion and
filtering techniques.
Changes to the Interception Inspection Regime
6.77 During the past three years we have made a number of significant improvements
to and strengthened the interception inspection regime, as we have mentioned in
previous reports.37
6.78 In 2015 we decided to make a number of further changes to the interception
inspection regime from January 2016. The first change is to move from bi-annual to
annual inspections of the warrantry processes at all interception agencies and warrant
issuing departments. This change will bring the interception regime in line with our
communications data regime under Chapter 2 of Part 1 of RIPA. It will enable us to
conduct more ad hoc thematic inquiries, investigations and reviews throughout the year
and allow us to implement a phased inspection programme for GCHQ where the scale
and complexity of the interception activity undertaken necessitates a different inspection
approach. The change from bi-annual to annual inspections of the warrantry process will
not lead to any reduction in oversight as we intend to scrutinise the same percentage of
warrantry documentation on an annual basis.
6.79 GCHQ is unique in terms of the type and scale of the interception it undertakes and
therefore it is necessary to take a different inspection approach with the GCHQ inspections
to ensure the process is audited from end to end. Moving to a phased inspection model
will enable us to concentrate in more detail on key themes and provide independent
verification of the end to end process. We have proposed a 5-phase inspection model
for GCHQ. It is our intention in 2016 to conduct a formal inspection on each of the five
phases and to arrange ad hoc visits in-between, when necessary, for example, to carry
out thematic reviews, audits or error investigations. The five phases are as follows:
6.80 Phase 1: Warrantry process – This phase will broadly cover an evaluation of the
systems in place for the interception of communications to ensure they are sufficient;
an examination of selected interception applications to assess whether they met the
requirements of necessity and proportionality; interviews with case officers, analysts and /
or linguists from selected investigations or operations to assess whether the interception
37 For example see Paragraphs 6.61 to 6.65 of our March 2015 report http://iocco-uk.info/docs/IOCCO%20
Report%20March%202015%20(Web).pdf
www.iocco-uk.info
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