As yet, no substantive response from the Home Office to my questions on the Indymedia disk seizure…
A conversation with someone affected by it last night has added another element that I think will need to be explored. I was told that there were personal emails stored on the servers as well as websites. If this is the case, then we do need to look at whether breaches of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act have taken place.
Part I of the Act is quite explicit in declaring that the interception of communications is illegal and subject to serious penalties except in certain very limited circumstances. This is explained as:
Interception of communications means the interception of a communication in the course of its transmission by means of a postal service or telecommunications system. In the UK interception is conducted under warrant. Such warrants are authorised personally by the Secretary of State. A warrant may only be authorised when the Secretary of State believes it both proportionate and necessary
- in the interests of national security;
- for the purpose of preventing or detecting serious crime or
- for safeguarding the economic well-being of the UK.
In the UK, interception warrants are intelligence gathering tools. RIPA prohibits material derived from interception warrants being adduced as evidence in court. The UK’s lawful interception regime is subject to oversight by the Interception of Communications Commissioner (see Part IV).
If emails have been intercepted outside this legal process then a serious criminal offence may have been committed. This may depend on whether the seizure of disks containing emails is considered to be “interception” as opposed to pulling them off the wires as they are being transmitted. My recollection of the debates on the Act is that emails are protected from interception wherever they are in the system so this would cover taking them from a store on a disk.
For an example of Police action taken under this Act, see the Cliff Stanford case.
[...] : General — Richard @ 11:17 pm
Phil raises an interesting question in a comment to the last post. He asks if emails taken from a server are not more like tak [...]
If emails have been intercepted outside this legal process then a serious criminal offence may have been committed… — yeah… two options here I can think of:
1. The UK Govt really didn’t know anything about this, however if this is the case why are they being so reluctant to say that this is the case?
2. The UK Govt was consulted, knowing that it would be complicated to go through the legal hoops (and fearing that the data might get wiped while they did jump through the hoops) they gave the FBI a nod and a wink to get on with it with the intention that they would deny all knowledge of it…
Being rather cynical I suspect that 2. is closer to what might have happened. After all projects like Echelon has been specifically set up to enable citizens to be spied upon from outside their own countries to aviod the need to comply with domestic laws, and Guantanamo has been set up to avoid the US having to comply with POW obligations…
Surely the “interception” of emails from the disk of the mail server on which they reside is equivalent to the police getting a warrant to search your house, and taking away the pile of letters on your kitchen table, or the tape from your answering machine. [Assuming that the email had actually been delivered to its destination mailbox.] There’s at least a reasonable argument that the destination of an email is not necessarily a computer owned by the adressee – I read all my mail with IMAP, and the permanent copies stay on the mail server, owned by the university for which I work.
Whatever the technicaltites of the case, the spirit of the RIP act here would seem to be that if a disk containing emails was taken incidently to an otherwise legal investigation, and the emails were not read or copied beyond the glance necessary to identify them as emails and po possible “communication”, then that’s OK. If the police are pouring over the content of the emails or have handed them over to a foreign power, that may be rather bad.
The practicalities of the situation is that anyone who writes anything incriminating in an unencrypted email is a bloody idiot.
Like totally late on this one but A NEW IMC every 5 days more like it!!! Rattle my snake but if you read some theories the world is shaping for a huge rehash. Totally agree with the fact that everyone rules the roost. Just wonder what y all think about them blogs now that they’re the biggest form of indymedia. Read some conspiracy theorists like adam trueblood, jack spiro and some prediction theorists like stephen thanabalan and they all have some common threads addressing indymedia- that blogs are the temporal manifestation of what will surely become the debunking of traditional hierachies of media. thanabalan points out that the blogs are only the first adjustment steps before something more massive and far reaching in terms of accessibility and interconnectivity emerges, but more telling is that the next decade determines whether or not we rate or allow ourselves to continue to be shaped by the current hierachical structures of last century’s media structures. I personally think indymedia is the way forward and we will be well on our way to shaping our new forms of ‘communal discursive social change’ through it. Wanna know what you guys think.