Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner - July 2016
Points of Note
Interception of Communications
3059 interception warrants (to access the content of communications and related
communications data) were issued in 2015. Approximately 2.5% of those warrants
were approved urgently.
65% of the 3059 warrants were issued for the purpose of the prevention or
detection of serious crime, 34% in the interests of national security and the
remaining 1% for a combination of purposes.
1518 interception warrants were extant on 31 December 2015. Of those, 22 were
issued under section 8(4) of RIPA.
In 2015 IOCCO conducted 26 interception inspections. During these inspections
1148 interception warrants were examined which equates to three quarters of
the number of extant warrants at the end of the year or three eighths of the new
warrants issued in 2015.
The total number of recommendations made in our inspection reports for the
nine interception agencies and four warrant issuing departments was 74. The
majority of recommendations fell into three key categories – application process,
authorisation / implementation of warrants and procedures.
We also carried out a review of the retention of interception applications and
associated documentation and found, unsurprisingly given the lack of specific
provisions in RIPA and the Code of Practice, a variety of different arrangements
within the interception agencies, the warrant issuing departments and the
Communication Service Providers (CSPs).
62 interception errors were reported to IOCCO in 2015. 81% of the errors fell
into three main categories: section 15/16 safeguards breaches, failure to cancel
interception, or interception of the incorrect identifier.
Building upon the significant improvements that we have made over recent years
to our interception inspection regime we have decided in 2016 to move from
bi-annual inspections of the warrantry process to annual inspections. The same
volume of applications will be examined during the inspections and so there will
be no less scrutiny of the warrantry process. However this will free up more time
for us to carry out thematic inquiries, investigations and reviews, and enable us to
implement a five-phase inspection programme for GCHQ which reflects the scale
and complexity of the interception activities GCHQ undertakes.
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