Proposed UK Communications Law Could Be Used To Spy On Physical Mail

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that the UK's Draft Communications Bill includes a provision which could be used to force the Royal Mail and other mail carriers to retain data on all physical mail passing through their networks. The law could be used to force carriers to maintain a database of any data written on the outside of an envelope or package which could be accessed by government bodies at will. Such data could include sender, recipient and type of mail (and, consequentially, the entire contents of a postcard). It would provide a physical analog of the recently proposed internet surveillance laws. The Home Office claims that it has no current plans to enforce the law."

Comments

Be very afraid...

[frostilicus2]

Someone should really tell the guys in power that 1984 was more of warning and less of a plan. Guess the old e-petition becomes invalid now: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400

Re:Be very afraid...

[game kid]

Ah, but that's a petition to "Scrap Plans to Monitor all Emails and Web Usage". If they only monitor 99.999% of them they can still say they accepted the petition. :)

Re:Be very afraid...

[frostilicus2]

It's amusing that an influential person like (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee can make a statements such as this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17753971 in the national press and the population don't even blink...

"no current plans to enforce the law."

[NettiWelho]

"The Home Office claims that it has no current plans to enforce the law." Really? Then why is the provision in the bill then? If you dont need and dont plan on enforcing it why is it being passed then?

Re:"no current plans to enforce the law."

[mcavic]

Because if they decide to implement it in the future, they can do so without taking the time to pass a new law. And "current" means today, not tomorrow.

Re:"no current plans to enforce the law."

[Blue Stone]

They say "no current plans" not "no current intentions".

They have the intention of using it, they just haven't got around to drawing up the plans yet.

Politicians lie. Even when they're telling the truth.

Re:"no current plans to enforce the law."

[Kijori]

It is enabling legislation - a statute that allows particular laws to be passed by secondary legislation (also called a statutory instrument - basically legislation that is 'passed' by a minister or a committee of ministers rather than the entire Parliament). It may sound undemocratic but it's inevitable - Parliament could not possibly scrutinise and pass enough legislation to deal with the pace at which the world changes. The power has to be devolved somewhere, and devolving it to Ministers at least has the advantage that someone visible is accountable for it, which means that the power is generally used sensibly and sparingly.

In this case the power, to my mind, seems more extensive than is appropriate for secondary legislation - I'm not defending it, just explaining why it is being done the way it is. There is some comfort in the fact that the Bill is still in the very early stages of the process and extensive secondary powers are the sort of thing that are often removed or curtailed during the debates.

Re:"no current plans to enforce the law."

[ATMAvatar]

Both liberals and conservatives screw the population as a whole. The liberals tend to lie about it and act like they want to do some good, while the conservatives are rather brazen about giving more money to the wealthy, but they both ultimately do the same thing - concentrate power and money into a small elite group.

In the end, what trickles down to the rest of us isn't green - it's yellow.

Hmm...

[girlintraining]

Potential Terrorist 391,496, mail log:
Received junk mail from Direct Marketing Alliance.
Received junk mail from Insurance company
Received junk mail from Direct Marketing Alliance.
Received junk mail from "V14GR4 4 U"
Received junk mail from Derp's Amazing Electronics.
Received copy of Harry Potter 4 via Netflix.
...

Well, on one hand, a warrant should be needed for any kind of surveillance. Monitoring activity pre-warrant shouldn't be legal. That said... snail mail is dying. It's mostly just junk mail, bills, and packages ordered online. I can't see how this would have much intelligence value.... Especially since, at least in the US, if you simply reverse the sender and receiver and leave off the stamp, it'll happily go to its destination as long as it's in the same geographic area. Oh wait... was that helping the terrorists? My bad.

This is completely ILLEGAL under the UDHR (UN)

[dryriver]

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is INTERNATIONAL LAW, and which the UK is a signatory of, states it crystal clear in Article 12: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or CORRESPONDENCE, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." ---------- URL here for those who want to check the validity of this claim: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a12 ------ So UK Home Office, how the hell are you going to explain to the UNITED NATIONS that your little mail-snooping project violates ARTICLE 12 of the UDHR? -------- If you were going to pull shit like this, why did your government sign and rattify the UDHR to begin with? Why can't you just leave your citizens alone, like other civilized countries. And, finally, have you learned nothing from George Orwell's '1984'? It was published back in 1949, so you have had OVER 60 YEARS to learn something from that brilliant, brilliant piece of work, which was written by someone who was your countryman no less, who was British. ------ I give up. The more I look at the UK from a privacy perspective, the more I feel that that particular country has really gone down the drain, and perhaps irreversibly so.

Re:This is completely ILLEGAL under the UDHR (UN)

[dryriver]

This is what Wikipedia has on the subject: "While not a treaty itself, the Declaration was explicitly adopted for the purpose of defining the meaning of the words "fundamental freedoms" and "human rights" appearing in the United Nations Charter, which is binding on all member states. For this reason the Universal Declaration is a fundamental constitutive document of the United Nations. Many international lawyers, in addition, believe that the Declaration forms part of customary international law and is a powerful tool in applying diplomatic and moral pressure to governments that violate any of its articles. The 1968 United Nations International Conference on Human Rights advised that it "constitutes an obligation for the members of the international community" to all persons. The declaration has served as the foundation for two binding UN human rights covenants, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the principles of the Declaration are elaborated in international treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and many more. The Declaration continues to be widely cited by governments, academics, advocates and constitutional courts and individual human beings who appeal to its principles for the protection of their recognised human rights."

Re:We've heard this before

[Mashiki]

Greetings from post WWII Europe and East Germany. Where the STASI did exactly this, and neighbors spied on each other. I wonder how long before the underground springs up and things start getting smuggled around? Well I'm sure there's a few ex-east germans who would be more than willing to give the Brit's tips on how to do it.

Re:What are Brits control freaks?

[manicb]

We didn't vote for it, and we actually voted against it. None of this stuff was in the manifesto of either of the parties in the ruling coalition. They were highly critical of similar legislation when proposed by their opponents, who were turfed out in the last general election. We've had such a long run of crazy authoritarian Home Secretaries now that it's pretty clear somebody or something is getting to them, possibly through their office (or bedroom) window.

Re:Does anyone actually believe that what's...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

on the outside of an envelope (or any part of a post card) has ever actually been private? Certainly not I, even before I knew enough to care about privacy.

You are overloading the term "private" - no one thought it was a secret, but only the crazies thought that the information on every single envelope was permanently recorded in a database. Crazy is the new normal.