Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner - July 2016
7.20 As a result of our findings the Home Office sought to improve the statistical
requirements and included new provisions in the March 2015 revised Code of Practice.
We published guidance43 in November 2015 to assist public authorities to interpret the
new statistical requirements and collate the statistics in a standardised way for the annual
return. The new provision for “items of data” has improved transparency by providing a
realistic assessment of the use of the powers and enables more accurate comparisons to
be drawn between public authorities.
7.21 The new statistical requirements did not come into force until the end of
March 2015 and as a result it was not feasible (technically or practically) for many of
the public authorities to apply the new requirements back to the start of January 2015.
Understandably it also took a while for some public authorities’ technical systems to be
configured to capture some of the new requirements. A number of the annual statistical
returns have therefore been projected, based on the available information (i.e. three
quarters of 2015) to produce a 12-month figure. Evidence shows that the use of these
powers remains constant through the year and so we are confident that the projections
provide a more accurate picture of use than the previous limited statistical requirements.
Other detailed breakdowns are based on partial figures.
7.22 The rules that apply to each data set are explained further in Annex B, along
with the number of items of data acquired by each public authority and whether this
figure has been projected to equate to 12 months, or not. It is important to note that the
counting conventions are completely different to previous years and for this reason it is
not possible to draw statistical comparisons with previous reports.
Statistical Information
7.23 Items of data. 761,70244 items of communications data were acquired by public
authorities during 2015. An item of data is a request for data on a single identifier or
other descriptor, for example, 30 days of incoming and outgoing call data in relation to a
mobile telephone would be counted as one item of data.
7.24 Type of data. 50% of data acquired was subscriber information, 48% of the data
acquired was traffic data and 2% was service use information (Figure 6).
43 http://www.iocco-uk.info/docs/SRO%20Circular%20(3)%20Statistical%20Guidance%20Document%20
for%20Annual%20Statistical%20Return.pdf
44 Based on projected figures for certain public authorities – see Annex B
www.iocco-uk.info
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