Transparency calls around surveillance powers

Information commissioner Christopher Graham has said there needs to be more transparency around the remit of surveillance powers that could encroach on the public’s privacy.

Giving evidence before the Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, Graham advised that the Home Office should offer more clarity about the increased surveillance powers granted within the Bill to assuage public concerns about privacy violations.

He warned that the government must ensure the bulk collection of data proposed in the Bill was used effectively and suggested it was ‘very difficult to judge’ if the Bill in its current form strikes the right balance between security and privacy, due to a lack of evidence.

Graham said: "The Bill proposes that data can be required to be retained for 12 months, but there's no particular explanation why 12 months rather than six months or 18 months is desired, as there is no indication of the use that such information is being put to over many months or years in the normal way or dealing with serious crime or terrorism.

"The challenge for the data protection framework is to make sure that information remains private where it should be private, or if it's accessed and shared, it is done so within a regime of data protection where it is agreed.

"What I'm not prepared to sign up to is the suggestion that the state ultimately always has the right to always access that stuff just because it can. They have got to constantly make the case for necessity and proportionately for anything that invades our privacy, whether it's commercial information or state agencies, whether information sharing in the health service or information to keep us safe and secure from a terrorist threat."