UK's response to Snowden's revelations lets Putin off the hook

The UK's response to Snowden's revelations lets Putin off the hook

The surveillance watchdog report clearing GCHQ provides a worrying precedent for the Russian president and other autocrats

Mark Stephens

"Our intelligence efforts are strictly regulated by our law," responded Vladimir Putin to a question from Edward Snowden live on Russia Today. He added: "We don't have a mass system of such interception, and according to our law, it cannot exist." The Russian president may as well have been reading from a UK script.

Earlier this month, David Cameron welcomed a new report by the UK's lickspittle surveillance watchdog assuring us that our surveillance laws remain fit for purpose, contrary to Snowden's disclosures. The report, by the interceptions of communications commissioner, Sir Anthony May, says UK agencies do not "engage in random mass intrusion into the public affairs of law abiding UK citizens", noting that "it would be comprehensively illegal if they did".

The report exemplifies the ways in which the UK response to the Snowden revelations is providing a worrying precedent for Putin and other autocrats, and has been incommensurate to the scope and scale of the problem at hand.

Compared with the reports issued by previous commissioners during the pre-Snowden era, there are some improvements, with Big Brother Watch noting "a marked improvement on the quality and quantity of information that has been presented in the past". Such improvements, however, highlight the shortcomings of the oversight system as a whole.

For example, with unexpected candour, the report says that key legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa), "is a difficult statute to understand", and devotes many pages to explaining its complex provisions before abruptly concluding that they should not be revised.

Although the confidential annex that has accompanied previous reports has been dropped, the report's nanny-knows-best assurances that the UK does not engage in mass surveillance remain credulous, undermined by the commissioner's own admission that "it is not so easy to give a relevant public account of what the interception agencies actually do because much of it is sensitive".

Nor is it easy to reconcile this statement with the revelations made by Snowden, as to the collection and retention of data on such a scale that every one of us is identifiable in all our failings and foibles.

What is urgently needed is a well-funded, frank investigation of the most worrying of the Snowden revelations regarding the surveillance practices of GCHQ, such as the alleged interception of millions of webcam images from Yahoo users with no connection to terrorism, and the mass interception of communications via the fibre-optic cables that pass through the UK through the Tempora program. Such an investigation must go beyond Ripa and examine mass data handoversthat may be taking place without any statutory oversight under section 94 of the Telecommunications Act.

Meanwhile, Russia and other governments with truly redoubtable human rights records are able to point to UK surveillance practices to justify their own. Despite the commissioners' best efforts, this report does little to distinguish Britain's interception systems from those of Russia. Ripa has similarities to the Russian system of operative-investigative measures (Sorm), which is used throughout much of the former Soviet Union, and which combines legal and administrative oversight with systems that in practice allow direct, unfettered access to communications networks; indeed, in most cases provision of such access is a licence prerequisite for telcos and ISPs.

Moving beyond the status quo will require much greater transparency reforms than have been considered in Britain so far. Here, US reforms may prove instructive. The combination of reporting on the Snowden disclosures and legal challenges by civil liberties organisations and technology companies has led the Obama administration to embrace some important, if insufficient, increases in transparency. And US Congress is considering multiple proposals for legislative reform. The declassification of an array of documents means that much more information is available about the most controversial NSA practices, such as the bulk collection of phone records, compared with what we know about GCHQ. A similar approach in the UK would allow the interception commissioner the chance to show his work, and rebuild some degree of trust with the public.

The UK's reputation as a champion of online freedoms and open government is on the line. Importantly, some rhetoric has begun to shift in recent months, with Nick Clegg convening an "expert panel" via theRoyal United Services Institute (Rusi) to review use of internet data for surveillance purposes. If that review, and future reports from the interceptions commissioner are to restore trust, far greater levels of candour will be required.

If there is to be mass intrusion into our private spaces, then there needs to be a quid pro quo of informed public debate and informed consent.

It cannot be right that there is oversight of crocodile clips attached to copper wires in a telephone exchange or interception of the Royal Mail, yet geopbytes of data may be sucked unchecked and without consent from the telephony networks.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/20/uk-response-snowden-putin-surveillance-gchq