Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act

The Government has today published its draft Investigatory Powers Bill. There are 299 pages in the legislation alone, so for now I've been looking at the parts most likely to affect Janet and its customers. So far I’ve looked at a bit less than half of the Bill: further implications, if any, will be the subject of future posts.

Earlier this week Parliament passed the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIP), in response to the European Court of Justice's April 2014 declaration of the invalidity of the 2006 European Data Retention Directive on which the UK data retention law depended.

If you look up "interception" in most dictionaries you’ll find that it happens before an action has completed: in sport a pass can no longer be “intercepted” once it reaches a teammate. In a legal dictionary, however, that turns out not to be true. According to section 2(2) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) interception can take place at any time when a message is "in transmission", which is explained by section 2(7):

The Joint Committee on the Draft Communications Bill has published its report, concluding that while there is “a case for legislation which will provide the law enforcement agencies with some further access to communications data” the current proposal needs “substantial re-writing”.