Telephone-tapping - how much?
01 January 1991
Telephone-tapping - how much?
artdoc August=1991
The 1990 annual report of the Commissioner, appointed under
section 8 of the Interception of Communications Act 1985, to the
Prime Minister was published in April. It states that during 1990
the number of warrants issued by the Home Secretary to tap
telephones was 473 and to intercept letters 42 (the additional
figures for Scotland were 66 and 2 respectively). The
Commissioner, the Rt Hon Lord Justice Lloyd, states that he is
`satisfied that this system works'. However, recent evidence
given to the Guardian shows that 35,000 telephone lines are now
being tapped each year. Warrants to tap phones and to open mail
are issued by the Home Secretary to the police, Customs and
Excise and MI5 (the Security Service). The report does not cover
warrants issued by the Foreign Secretary or the Northern Ireland
Office, or `bugging', where devices or phones are used to listen
to conversations in a target's home or office, or the
surveillance undertaken by Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ) at Cheltenham. In the case of a threatened strike in a
essential industry, covered by civil contingency planning or a
major demonstration such as that on the poll tax, a single
warrant issued against a subversive organisation can involve
hundreds of `target' telephones. The Commissioner's report shows
that 60% of the warrants issued to the police did not result in
an arrest, nor did 50% of those issued to HM Customs and Excise.
The report states that there were: `only a handful of individuals
subject to warrants on the ground that they posed a major threat
to parliamentary democracy... By the end of 1990 there were only
two. The number of subversive organisations covered by warrants
has also decreased. At the end of 1990 there were less than half
the previous year.' Indeed the report states that: `The level of
threat from subversion has remained very low during 1990'. The
report tackles the question of metering as a means of monitoring
telephone calls. This involves recording the duration and
destination of phone calls. As `a warrant' is not required for
metering there can be no offence of unauthorised metering under
the 1985 Act, and although disclosure of this information is
prohibited exceptions are available for the prevention and
detection of crime and `in the interest of national security'.
Metering the destination of calls is a standard means of
surveillance for both criminals (police) and subversive
organisations (Special Branch and MI5) to establish contacts and
friendship networks. Fifty-nine people made complaints that
their phones were tapped to the Tribunal set up under the 1985
Act, but none were upheld. Overall the Commissioner's report
gives the impression that all tapping is authorised by a
warrants, that it is all justified under the 1985 Act, and that
there is no cause for complaint. In June the Guardian carried
a report which estimated that over 35,000 phones are being tapped
each year installed by 70 specialist engineers known as
`squirrels'; in 1980 there were 40 tapping engineers (a similar
report was carried in the Observer in 1988 which estimated 30,000
phones a year were being tapped). These engineers are
responsible for installing taps on phone lines at exchanges and
for placing `bugs' which pick up conversations. Calls on tapped
lines are relayed to a reception centre at the BT HQ in Gresham
Street, London where over a further hundred engineers route the
calls to banks of tape machines or directly to MI5 and MI6 (the
external Secret Service). BT employs transcribers to type out
relevant conversations for different agencies.
By the mid 1990s the new phone National Network's Central
Operations Unit at Oswestry will be able to place taps on phone
calls by computer and do away with visits by the `squirrels' to
local exchanges. The improvement of current voice recognition and
the introduction of k