UK: Telephone-tapping - how much?
01 July 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 key-word computerised transcripts will also greatly increase the tapping capacity.
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