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The release of the typo-filled chip-wrapping served only to fuel a wave of mystery around the launch: who was actually writing the paper, who’s funding it, why do no companies exist – even whether the […]
Birmingham City Council keen to keep an eye on its citizens
Posted By james on August 6th, 2009
Below are my thoughts on another recent Help Me Investigate project - this time looking at Birmingham Council’s use of the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which allows covert surveillance powers for investigating misdemeanours.
Figures released in response to this FOI request by Paul Bradshaw reveal - I believe, at first glance - that Birmingham is compartively trigger happy, using powers granted by the act six times more than typical councils.
Update 3pm Friday 7th: Please see the comments section for a health warning over the 1,707 statistic and resulting conclusion thaty Birmingham is so prolific a user of RIPA. This investigation remains a work in progress!
Birmingham accounts for roughly a 60th of the UK’s population (pop c. 1 million). In 2007 (calendar year) there were 1,707 council applications to use RIPA powers nationwide.
Unfortunanately these totals are given in financial years. For 2006/7 there were 115 uses of RIPA in Birmingham, in 2007/8 there were 99.
So conservatively assuming there were 100 uses of RIPA in 2007, Birmingham accounted for just under 6% of all local council RIPA uses, despite only accounting for 1% of the population. So it’s surveilling roughly six times as many of its citizens as the typical council.
Other issues get more subjective. Home Office guidlines stress “very strict safeguards” on RIPA use, which should be in “exceptional circumstances” only. Does having 22 officials authorised to use RIPA match that? Does surveilling 575 people? Personally I have my doubts.
Take fly tipping. RIPA has been used 27 times in relation to fly tipping, despite “late bins” being one of the example issues used to reassure the public on RIPA safeguards.
Relevent extract from Home Office:
“Local authorities have a range of powers available to them to tackle littering and fly tipping. However it shouldn’t be necessary or appropriate to use RIPA directed surveillance powers to observe people putting their rubbish bins out early for collection. RIPA allows certain public authorities to authorise covert surveillance and covert human intelligence sources for the prevention and detection of crime and prevention of disorder – but only where it is necessary and proportionate to do so.
When councils use RIPA we expect them to use these laws proportionately and sensibly in the interest of investigating crimes and protecting their communities.”
As to next steps, the prosecution issues and so forth are clearly going to prove difficult to appeal. Is there any hope of persuading some local bloggers - or better - local papers to pick up what’s been got already and trying to encourage some people to come forward?
Identifying some people involved would both humanise this, and help get a subjective handle on how reasonable Birmingham’s RIPA use is.
Any thoughts?
Tags: computer assisted reporting, Freedom of Information, help me investigate, RIPA, surveillance
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Comments 6
August 6th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Thanks enormously for pulling this stuff out. I’m still in awe…
August 7th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
This is really good analysis of the results but there’s one thing I’m not clear on. The Home Office FAQ you link to gives the 1707 figure but the article Paul originally linked to on the investigation page gave a number of 5000.
‘Local councils were authorised to conduct nearly 5,000 “directed surveillance” missions in the year to the end of March, he revealed.’
Does directed surveillance include other tools/powers apart from RIPA?
If not and assuming the 5000 figure is accurate (the Guardian claim the source is the surveillance commissioner) then Birmingham is very - almost extremely - restrained.
August 7th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Looking again at the Home Office page it looks like the 1707 figure is requests for communication data but the RIPA powers also cover covert surveillance.
‘* In 2007-08 there were a total of 33,359 RIPA authorisations for covert surveillance (23,620 for law enforcement agencies and 9,739 other public authorities)
* Of the 33,359 covert surveillance authorisations, 28,302 were for directed surveillance (18,767 for law enforcement and 9,535 for other public authorities) and 4,702 for covert human intelligence sources (4,498 law enforcement and 204 other public authorities).’
Compare:
http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/ripa/communications-data/
http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/ripa/covert-surveillance/
August 7th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Looks like a very good point Ian. I’ll look into it further after work today – glad I put the safety warning on the above!
August 7th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Actually, delving into it I believe Ian is right as to the provenance of the 1,707 figure. Although there is some doubt.
The trouble with the remaining numbers is that key phrase - “other public authorities”. Council use of RIPA has traditionally been only a fraction of percentage of all RIPA use. There are over 750 authorities able to use RIPA, and only 475 of those are local authorities.
Tech site The Register has referred to the 1,707 2007 figure on RIPA a few times, possibly incorrectly in this piece: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/26/libdems_council_spying/.
However, the lib dems research is very interesting. Have we asked them if they’ll share the data behind it?
August 7th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Oh, missed a paragraph. The numbers obtained by the lib dems show 180 councils used RIPA a total of 10,288 times over five years.
Based on that, a typical council used RIPA 57 times over that period. Birmingham is of course much bigger than many councils, but still used it 575 times over that period.
The lib dems numbers would be very interesting. Also important is clarifying exactly to what that 1,707 figure refers, and if necessary asking the Home Office for the total number of RIPA uses by local authorities, broken down into comms data, directed surveillance and covert surveillance.