Home Affairs Committee – oral evidence on Home Office response to terrorism

Some interesting evidence here, particularly from Sir Ken MacDonald QC, former Director of Public Prosecutions, and on the matter of intercept evidence in court.

What Sir Ken MacDonald says about the infringements we managed to avoid is worth hearing (1 hour 2 mins in) – pretty shocking what has been proposed by those at the top.

e-Borduhs

The Register:

Government legal officials are still investigating whether aspects of the £1.2bn e-Borders scheme are illegal, a year after concerns were raised by Eurostar.

Lawyers for the cross-channel train operator believe the system will require it to break European data privacy laws. They have been pressing the UK Border Agency to clarify the situation since November last year. At their most recent meeting in September, officials told Eurostar they were still mulling the problem.

“There’s been no progress at all,” said a spokesman for the firm. “They said they were still looking into it.”

The ultimate goal of e-Borders is to centrally log every single traveller in and out of the UK, which will mean obtaining personal details before they travel. The UK Border Agency wants carriers to collect the data abroad on its behalf. Eurostar believes this will mean driving an express train through French and Belgian data legislation, both of which implement the EU data laws.

“We believe, and the legal advice we have had is that it is not legal to export the sort of data required by e-Borders within the EU, and it is only legal to export that data outside of the EU,” the firm’s customer service director told the Home Affairs Select Committee back in June. Even then, Eurostar expressed frustration at the government’s lack of response to the possibility it will be “caught in a position that we are abiding by UK law but breaking EU law”.

“I would feel very uncomfortable if I had waited seven months to respond to a letter from the UK Borders Agency on an e-Borders matter,” Noaro said. …

Bad phorm

The Register:

The UK government today came a step closer to international embarrassment over its failure to act against BT and Phorm for their secret trials of mass internet snooping technology. The European Commission said it had moved to the second stage of infringement proceedings after the trials, revealed by The Register, exposed failings in the UK’s implementation of privacy laws.

BT and Phorm intercepted and profiled the web browsing of tens of thousands of broadband subscribers without their consent in trials in 2006 and 2007.

The furore generated by the scandal forced Phorm to withdraw from the UK market, but police and the Information Commissioner’s Office both declined to take any action against the firms.

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The provisions of the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications that prohibit “unlawful interception and surveillance without the user’s consent” had not been properly brought into UK law, the Commission said. …

DNA database FAIL

The Register:

The estimated number of people whose DNA profile is stored by the government has broken the five million mark for the first time.

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The untrammelled growth of the world’s largest repository of human DNA information on a per capita basis has continued, despite the government’s defeat at the European Court of Human Rights last December.

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last week, an official report showed that despite the growth of the database, detections based on DNA evidence have fallen.

Dangerous sabre-rattling

Tom Winsor in the Times on Harriet Harman’s recent threats:

The media is hot with the notion of a special Act of Parliament to extinguish his contractual rights.

Unless it has the effect of persuading the man voluntarily to give up the money, this is all dangerous sabre-rattling. Ministers cannot direct RBS to break this contract. The Government is obliged to uphold the law, including the law of contract, and the RBS board would be perfectly entitled to refuse to comply. Even if the bank were to withhold the money, its former chief executive could sue and would win. Contracts are binding on the parties to them, yes, even if you are Her Majesty’s Government. How inconvenient.

Legislating wouldn’t work either. The European Convention on Human Rights says that a state cannot expropriate private property without paying adequate compensation. Even if a British court were to enforce this special legislation, Sir Fred would win in Strasbourg.

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Unfortunately, the present Government has form. In 2001, the Government’s No1 hate figure then was Railtrack …

Worth reading the whole article.