International Law

Privy Council Intercept as Evidence Advisory Group interim progress report 9th February 2009

The House of Commons Library now has a copy of the bPrivy Council Intercept as Evidence Advisory Group interim progress report 9th February 2009 (.pdf image scan only)

As predicted in our previous blog article, Chilcot Advisory Group on Intercept Evidence (lack of) Progress Report, there has been little tangible progress in the last year..

Note the emphasis on

Preventing successful defence "fishing expeditions"

bur there are no effective safeguards against prosecution "fishing expeditions", are there ?

Key stakeholders, such as Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have been engaged, in order to ensure that their legitimate concerns are identified and reflected at an appropriately early stage.

"Communications Service Providers" i.e. telecommunications and internet service provider companies have their own commercial agenda, which do not usually coincide with the privacy and security interests of their business and individual customers, neither of which seem to be represented as "stakeholders" in this Intercept as Evidence review.

If there had been anybody with some internet and telecommunications industry Consumer Privacy and Digital Rights experience on the Advisory Group, they might have been able to highlight the entirely negative consumer experience and collateral damage, where the commercial interests of CSPs conflict with those of their customers. Why shouldn't members of the public or businesses, who have suffered as a result of Phorm style deep packet inspection and interception, be able to call for Intercept Evidence in Court in civil cases ?

This Advisory Group does not appear to be considering an important aspect of current, let alone future technology and practice, which has already been misused in foreign terrorism trials involving mobile phone intercept evidence, such as those in Spain, namely the black art of supposedly expert "Voice Matching" technology. This is especially important where no clearly incriminating words have been uttered in the intercepted phone call.

See our Questions about the case of the first person to be served with a European Arrest Warrant in the UK, Farid Hilali, who was extradited to Spain, where he is facing

The whole European Union and other Mutual Legal Assistance legal aspects of United Kingdom "Intercept as Evidence" do not appear to be under consideration by this Advisory Group.

In order to help Spy Blog readers and future students of this creepy Surveillance Society / Police State, we have OCR / copy edited this image scan into a more web search engine friendly text based format below:

Full post as published by Spy Blog on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).