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A Democratic Licence to Operate
achieve efficiency savings; or local authorities, trying to plan the provision of council
services or to model the likely impact of planned buildings, for instance.70
Data and Law-Enforcement Agencies
1.68
The digital society has had a significant impact on the police and other law-enforcement
agencies. ‘Traditional’ forms of crime such as fraud are no longer geographically focused;
an instance of crime may now have victims across the UK or across many jurisdictions
overseas. Criminality has become ‘digitally enabled’ and law enforcement cannot
only respond to this on a purely localised basis. In 2014, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate
of Constabulary warned that police are ‘falling behind the curve of rapidly changing
criminality’ because of a ‘deficit in the skill and experience of investigating officers’.71
Virtually all investigations today have an online aspect and investigating agencies
must have sufficient skills both to establish evidence of criminality, particularly online
criminality, and to gather intelligence on potential future threats.
1.69
The increased amount of communications data held by CSPs in recent years has made
such information useful as an investigative tool for both security and law-enforcement
agencies. In 2014, the home secretary claimed that communications data have been
used as evidence in 95 per cent of all serious organised-crime cases handled by the
Crown Prosecution Service.72 Communications data can prove or disprove alibis, identify
associations between potential criminals, and can tie suspects to a crime scene. The
majority of requests to CSPs for communications data relate to preventing or detecting
crime. In 2014, 88.9 per cent of authorisations and notices for communications data by
public authorities were made by police forces and law-enforcement agencies.73
1.70
In general, law-enforcement investigators will seek to examine communications data as
part of their investigations in one of three scenarios:
•
•
•
The offence has taken place online, meaning the subsequent investigation must
also take place online. Volume crimes such as fraud and extortion are increasingly
carried out online
Evidence of an offence has been transmitted via the Internet or by telephone.
Telephone records, in particular, are normally examined in relation to individuals
in all but the most trivial of criminal cases since they are such a powerful method
of indicating (though not necessarily proving) someone’s location
They are interested in the digital footprint of a subject of interest – their
recent communications, their acquaintances, recently undertaken journeys,
70. Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, ‘Big Data: An Overview’, Postnote, No.
468, 2006.
71. Thomas P Winsor, State of Policing: The Annual Assessment of Policing in England and
Wales 2013/2014 (London: HMIC, 2014), p. 22.
72. Theresa May, Hansard, HC Oral Answers to Questions, Col. 456–57 (10 July 2014).
73. Anthony May, Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner: March 2015.