Big Brother Britain: Government and councils to spy on ALL our phones*

By JASON LEWIS
The Daily Mail UK

Officials from the top of Government to lowly council officers will be
given unprecedented powers to access details of every phone call in
Britain under laws coming into force tomorrow.

The new rules compel phone companies to retain information, however
private, about all landline and mobile calls, and make them available to
some 795 public bodies and quangos.

The move, enacted by the personal decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith,
will give police and security services a right they have long demanded:
to delve at will into the phone records of British citizens and businesses.

The Government will be given access to details of every phone call in
Britain.

But the same powers will also be handed to the tax authorities, 475
local councils, and a host of other organisations, including the Food
Standards Agency, the Department of Health, the Immigration Service, the
Gaming Board and the Charity Commission. The initiative, formulated in
the wake of the Madrid and London terrorist attacks

of 2004 and 2005, was put forward as a vital tool in the fight against
terrorism. However, civil liberties campaigners say the new powers
amount to a 'free for all' for the State snooping on its citizens.

And they angrily questioned why the records were being made available to
so many organisations. Similar provisions are being brought in across
Europe, but under much tighter regulation. In Britain, say critics,
private and sensitive information will inevitably fall into the wrong hands.

Records will detail precisely what calls are made, their time and
duration, and the name and address of the registered user of the phone.

The files will even reveal where people are when they made mobile phone
calls. By knowing which mast transmitted the signal, officials will be
able to pinpoint the source of a call to within a few feet. This can
even be used to track someone's route if, for example, they make a call
from a moving car.

Files will also be kept on the sending and receipt of text messages.

By 2009 the Government plans to extend the rules to cover internet use:
the websites we have visited, the people we have emailed and phone calls
made over the net.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has spearheaded the move to give police and
security services access to the phone records of British citizens and
businesses.

The new laws will make it a legal requirement for phone companies to
keep records for at least a year, and to make them available to the
authorities. Until now, companies have been reluctant to allow
unfettered access to their files, citing data protection laws, although
they have had a voluntary arrangement with law enforcement agencies
since 2003.

Many of the organisations granted access to the records already have
systems allowing them to search phone-call databases over a computer
link without needing staff at the phone company to intervene.

Police requests for phone records will need the approval of a
superintendent or inspector, while council officials must get permission
from the authority's assistant chief officer. Thousands of staff in
other agencies will be legally entitled to retrieve the records once the
request is approved by a senior official.

The new measures were implemented after the Home Secretary signed a
'statutory instrument' on July 26. The process allows the Government to
alter laws without a full act of Parliament.

The move was nodded through the House of Lords two days earlier without
a debate.

It puts into UK law a European Directive aimed at the 'investigation,
detection and prosecution of serious crime'. But the British law allows
the information to be used much more widely to combat all crimes,
however minor.

The huge number of organisations allowed to access this data was
attacked by Liberty, the civil liberties campaign group. Other
organisations allowed to see the data include the Royal Navy Regulating
Branch, the Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary, the Department of
Trade and Industry, NHS Trusts, ambulance and fire services, the
Department of Transport and the Department for the Environment.

A spokesman for Liberty said: 'Hundreds of bodies have been given the
power to look at this highly sensitive information. It is yet another
example of how greater and greater access is being given to information
on our movements with little debate and little public accountability.

'It is a free for all. There is a lack of oversight of how and why
public bodies are using these records. There is no public record of what
they are using this information for.'

Tony Bunyan, of civil liberties group Statewatch, said: 'The retention
of everyone's communications data is a momentous decision, one that
should not be slipped through Parliament without anyone noticing.'

Last year, the voluntary arrangement allowed 439,000 searches of phone
records. But the Government brought in legislation because the industry
did not routinely keep all the information it wanted.

Different authorities will have different levels of access to the
systems. Police and intelligence services will be able to see more
detailed information than local authorities. And officials at NHS Trusts
and ambulance and fire services can obtain the records only in rare
cases when, for example, they are trying to save a patient's life.

The new system will be overseen by the Interception of Communications
Commissioner, who also ensures security and intelligence services' phone
taps are legal.

The commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy, reports to the Prime Minister and
already carries out random inspections of some agencies legally allowed
to see phone records under the existing voluntary scheme. Last year
inspectors visited 22 councils already making 'significant' use of their
powers' to access phone records. A report said the results were
'variable', but within the law.

Privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner, which has responsibly for
protecting personal information and policing the Data Protection Act had
virtually no role in the new laws.

A spokeswoman said its only function was to ensure 'data security' at
the phone companies, adding: 'We have no oversight role over the release
of this information.'

The Home Office said there were safeguards to ensure the new law was
being used properly. Every authority had a nominated senior member of
staff who was legally responsible for the use the phone data was put to,
'the integrity of the process' and for 'reporting errors'.

A spokesman said: 'The most detailed level of data can be accessed only
by law enforcement agencies such as the police. More basic access is
available to local authority bodies such as trading standards and
environmental health who can only use these powers to prevent and detect
crime.'

A spokesman for the Local Government Association, which represents
councils across England and Wales, said: 'Councils would only use these
powers in circumstances such as benefit fraud, when the taxpayer is
being ripped off for many thousands of pounds.'

He added that it was 'very unlikely' the powers would be used against
non-payers of council tax or for parking fines 'as the sums involved are
not sufficient to justify the use of this sort of information or the
costs involved in applying it'.