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A Democratic Licence to Operate
Commissioner, and the Intelligence Services Commissioner. It also put into statute the
establishment of Technical Advisory Board, designed to advise the home secretary on
whether the obligations imposed on CSPs under the terms of the Act are reasonable.
4.25
RIPA 2000 has been subject to a number of criticisms. The subject of these criticisms
typically falls into one of three categories:
•
•
•
It is opaque and difficult to understand
It has not kept up with the pace of technological change, particularly as the
distinctions between content and communications data, and domestic and
international communications, have become less clear
The powers it grants have been abused by a small number of public-sector bodies.
4.26
Firstly, it has been criticised for being a particularly difficult piece of legislation to
understand. JUSTICE, an independent law-reform and human-rights organisation,
argued that ‘it was not so much a comprehensive framework for surveillance powers so
much as a crude stitching-together of different regulatory regimes that were each highly
complex in their own right and, taken together, lacked all coherence’.10 The legislation is
accompanied, however, by periodically updated codes of practice.
4.27
Secondly, and as noted in Chapter I, the shape of the modern, digitised society has
evolved rapidly since 2000, and continues to do so. Whilst RIPA 2000 was written with
the stated intention of remaining technologically neutral, it was enacted just one year
after Google published its first press release, and four years before Facebook was even
conceived. Critics therefore argue that it is insufficiently specific in how the law applies
to new Internet communications. One academic notes that RIPA ‘was not written in the
age of social media and big data. It is inherently backward-looking’,11 while the Reform
Government Surveillance initiative highlights the fact that ‘the law in this area simply
has not kept pace with the scale of technological change ... gaps and weaknesses in the
framework have been exploited to enable the collection of our private communications
on a previously unimaginable scale’.12
4.28
RIPA 2000 took into account the fact that ‘not all of the system parts were within UK
territory, that devices and services could operate both within and outside of the UK and
that services do not necessarily relate to a company based within the UK’, and that it was
intended to apply to CSPs ‘offering services to UK users, wherever those companies and/
or their telecommunication systems were based’.13 However, it is acknowledged that this
was largely implicit in the legislation, rather than explicit.
10. JUSTICE, Freedom from Suspicion: Surveillance Reform for a Digital Age (London: Justice,
2011), p. 11.
11. Moore, ‘RIP RIPA?’, p. 127.
12. Don’t Spy on Us, ‘Don’t Spy on Us: Reforming Surveillance in the UK’, 2014, p. 10.
13. May, Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner: March 2015, p. 15.