MR JUSTICE BURTON
Approved Judgment
As set out in Paragraph 18(ix) above, such communications data are
colloquially called ‘metadata’.
ii)
It is related communications data if it:
“a) is obtained by, or in connection with, the interception; and
(b) relates to the communication or to the sender or recipient,
or intended recipient, of the communication;”
68.
iii)
“Intercepted material”, “in relation to an interception warrant means the
contents of any communications intercepted by an interception to which the
warrant relates”. It is common ground that this definition does not include
“related communications data”, separately defined as set out above.
iv)
“External communication” means a communication sent or received outside
the British Islands.
All parties refer to a passage in Hansard, when RIPA was debated in Parliament.
Lord Bassam of Brighton, the relevant Minister, in a speech which led to the
withdrawal of a proposed amendment, which had been proposed because Lord
Phillips of Sudbury had contended that “it will be extraordinarily difficult, if not
impossible, to capture simply external communications”, said as follows:
“It is just not possible to ensure that only external
communications are intercepted. That is because modern
communications are often routed in ways that are not all
intuitively obvious. Noble Lords who have contributed to the
debate understand that. An internal communication say, a
message from London to Birmingham—may be handled on
its journey by Internet service providers in, perhaps, two
different countries outside the United Kingdom. We
understand that. The communication might therefore be
found on a link between those two foreign countries. Such a
link should clearly be treated as external, yet it would
contain at least this one internal communication. There is no
way of filtering that out without intercepting the whole link,
including the internal communication.
Even after interception, it may not be practicably possible to
guarantee to filter out all internal messages. Messages may
well be split into separate parts which are sent by different
routes. Only some of these will contain the originator and
the intended final recipient. Without this information it will
not be possible to distinguish internal messages from
external. In some cases it may not be possible even if this
information is available. For example, a message between
two foreign registered mobile phones, if both happened to be
roaming in the UK, would be an internal communication, but
there would be nothing in the message to indicate that.