From  http://www.stand.org.uk

FAX YOUR MP NOW!

NEW SURVEILLANCE RULES TO BECOME LAW SOON:
ONLY YOUR MP CAN STOP IT

Hello,

Back in 2000, thousands of people helped fight the worst parts of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill. You offered to "adopt your MP", so that when duff technical legislation came before Parliament, somebody would be there to tell our more technologically naive MPs what was wrong with it and how to fix it.

No, no, you definitely did... (See  http://www.stand.org.uk/step1.php3 for a reminder if you don't recall any of this.)

After that initial flurry of activism, we haven't pestered you much. And, to be honest, since then Parliament has been fairly good about not stumbling into these areas without careful thought.

Until now....

SNOOPING FOR EVERYBODY

The 2000 RIP Act introduced many new powers. A statutory instrument is currently before Parliament which will extend one such power - the ability to intercept traffic data without a warrant - to a vast group of government bodies.

Traffic data is every part of a message that isn't the actual contents of message itself. The address on the envelope; the number of the phone call; the position of the cellphone; the address of the Web site you're visiting.

Previously only the police, secret services, the inland revenue and customs and excise could obtain access to this data from your ISP or telephone company.

If this order gets through, the following will join that list: The Department for Environment. Food and Rural Affairs. The Department of Health. The Home Office themselves. The DTI, The Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions. The Department for Work and Pensions, The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment for Northern Ireland.

Any local authority. Any fire authority. The service agencies of the Health Service, The Environment Agency, The Financial Services Authority, The Food Standards Agency, The Health and Safety Executive, The Information Commissioner, The Office of Fair Trading, The Postal Services Commission, The Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency, The Scottish Environment Protection Agency, The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary.

Oh, and Consignia. Or the Royal Mail. Or whatever it's called this week.

None of these groups will need a warrant, or any form of judicial review, to request logs of your communications. They can tap your traffic data on the slightest suspicion of criminal activity.

What's more, all of these groups don't need this access - they've said so themselves, in some cases. In the very rare occasions that they really do need this kind of data, they can already go get a court order for access. Judicial oversight, that's a good thing.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

This power grab isn't via a new law - it's via a statutory instrument. That means that unless an MP raises an objection to it, it becomes effective law from next Tuesday. This is all very bad. So we're asking you to return for just one more mission.

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:::UPDATE::: First round to us: after protests by MPs, the Government has postponed debate. Instead of next Tuesday (18th June), the Commons debate will now take place on the following Monday (24th June) - so we have more time to get our act together - come on, let's do it!!

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Please read up on this order, and write a letter to your MP, asking him or her to object to this new order.

We've redone the old STAND MP-faxing engine as  http://www.faxyourmp.com/ - so, as ever, contacting your MP is as simple as typing your postcode, and pasting in your letter.

To find out what to say, you can flick through the following articles. It really shouldn't take too long:

STAND's new Weblog has an article on the order at:  http://www.stand.org.uk/weblog/archive/2002/06/10/000193.php "Massive abuse" of privacy feared, says BBC  http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_2038000/2038036.stm The Guardian's briefing  http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,7369,731074,00.html As ever, writing a letter will only take a few minutes, and can have a tremendous effect.

Thanks for paying attention. STAND, incidentally, is going through a bit of revamp at the moment, so you can expect to hear from us a little more regularly in the future (no more often than once a month, but certainly more frequently than once every two years).

If you'd like to unsubscribe, send mail to  stand-unsubscribe@lists.stand.org.uk If you'd like to offer to help in other ways, mail  stand@stand.org.uk

And thanks again,

the STAND team.

-- If you'd like to unsubscribe from STAND, mail  stand-unsubscribe@lists.stand.org.uk

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::::FULL UPDATE::::: 13th June 2002

The Blunt Instrument Postponed

First round to us: after protests by MPs, the Government has postponed debate on RIPA Statutory Instrument (full details here). Instead of next Tuesday (18th June), the Commons debate will now take place on the following Monday (24th June). There's still a strong chance that, with enough public pressure and bad publicity, the Government can be pressured to withdraw the instrument. It's already had strongly negative coverage on Newsnight, the BBC's Question Time, and many other news sources.

Fax Your MP stats are showing around 280-300 faxes sent per day. That's unusually high, and while we can't tell what those faxes contain, we'd guess that almost all of them are related to protests against the RIP instrument.

If you haven't written your letter yet, you might want to consider these thoughts by others:

"the police service have had a strict RIPA manual and training procedures, and the background of years of operating [warrants], whereas the new Public Authorities [in the order] do not."

- Roland Perry, Director of Public Policy, London Internet Exchange

"I spoke to the deputy leader of the city council who was actually quite alarmed at the prospect of the local authority being given these powers."

- journalist, c/o Barbelith

"The difficulty that the Government has encountered in getting the right processes in place for the police should make us ultra-cautious in extending these powers to such a wide range of bodies. We don't think that there's been enough resources put into the oversight arrangements for the current proposals, let alone what will be needed for this huge extension. In practice, these bodies are going to obtain this personal data on anyone they wish, without any effective way of checking what they're doing".

- Ian Brown, Foundation for Information Policy Research
One final comment: the Prime Minister's official response has been to emphasise that RIP is for "combat serious crime" only. His spokesman then goes on to list the cases in which the traffic data can be legitimately obtained. That raises a few questions: firstly, if it's for serious crime only, why does the law permit suspicion of any crime to be sufficient reason(we actively lobbied for the inclusion of the word serious in the original Bill). Second: the list of reasons the PM's spokesman gives is complete, except for one omission - the one that allows the Secretary of State to add any other reasons, using another Statutory Instrument. If we can't trust them to restrict the users of traffic data, how can we trust them to restrict the usage? And third: if we can expect this law to be only used in the most serious cases, can we expect the most serious punishments for those who abuse it? A criminal trial? A prison sentence? Or just a perfunctory examination by the secretive RIP tribunal?

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WHAT SCHNEWS SAID THIS WEEK:

 http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news359.htm

Bug Eyed

This week England became Champions of the World. Not on the football pitch, but in the Nosey Parker Premier League thanks to plans to give a whole host of bureaucrats the power to spy on us. From NHS executives to your local council, the Department of Work and Pensions to the Department for Transport; from the Home Office to the Post Office all could be getting the same powers of surveillance as the police. This brilliant idea comes thanks to a proposed amendment to the Regulation of Investigator Powers (RIP) Act. If the order is approved by MPs next Tuesday and the Lords a week later, these organisations will be able to make telephone companies and internet service providers hand over detailed personal information on any of us - without a court order.

The RIP Act was passed two years ago and authorises the targeting of groups or individuals in order, as the Home Office puts it, “to obtain a picture of his life, activities and his associates”. It also authorises the bugging of homes and cars and the use of undercover agents. It covers the interception of pagers, mobile and satellite phones and e- mail, as well as private networks, including office switchboards.

Victims of surveillance cannot even appeal under the Human Rights Act, which supposedly enshrines the right to privacy because the RIP Act explicitly prevents such appeals. Your only chance to complain is to a tribunal - which of course meets in secret.

Not to be outdone and no doubt cheered-on by the British government, the European Parliament recently gave further powers to all EU governments to retain all communications data, monitor internet, phone and email traffic. European governments are now also able to force Internet service providers and phone companies to keep logs of their users’ communications for an as yet unspecified length of time. These records will allow investigators to build up a detailed picture of an individual’s movements online, including which websites they have visited, the nature of internet searches they have made, who they have e-mailed and when.

Since September 11th governments across the world have used the threat of terrorism to pass new laws to listen in on our every move. As Tony Bunyan, editor of Statewatch, says, “This is the latest casualty in the war against terrorism as far as civil liberties are concerned. The problem with wanting to monitor a few people is that you end up having to keep data on everybody.” Ian Brown, Director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research added “which websites we visit or where we travel with a mobile phone in our pocket reveals a great deal of personal information. Accessing this information needs to be made more difficult, not opened up to this huge range of new enquirers. I look at this list and wonder not at who they’ve added, but if I can possibly think of anyone they’ve left out.”

* Statewatch: 020 8802 1882  http://www.statewatch.org

* For more on surveillance:  http://tash.gn.apc.org/watched1.htm

*  http://www.stand.org.uk, the campaigning group that fought against the original RIP Act, has been resurrected to fight the new powers.