UK Parliament Watch

A committee of the British Parliament has proposed legal reforms to Britain's intelligence agencies that are mostly cosmetic and would do little to protect individual privacy.

In a report published on March 12, the Intelligence and Security Committee acknowledged that agencies like MI5 collect, sift through and examine millions of communications. Most of this is legal, the committee said, and justified by national security. It proposed a new law that would tell people more about the kind of information the government collects about them but would not meaningfully limit mass surveillance. That is hardly sufficient for a system that needs strong new checks and balances.

As things stand now, intelligence agencies can monitor vast amounts of communications and do so with only a warrant from a government minister to begin intercepting them. Lawmakers should limit the amount of data officials can sweep up and require them to obtain warrants from judges, who are more likely to push back against overly broad requests.

The parliamentary committee, however, did not see the need to limit data collection and concluded that ministers should continue to approve warrants because they are better than judges at evaluating diplomatic, political and public interests. That rationale ignores the fact that ministers are also less likely to deny requests from officials who directly report to them.

The committee's acceptance of the status quo partly reflects the fact that Britons have generally been more accepting of intrusive government surveillance than Americans ; security cameras, for instance, are ubiquitous in Britain. But the committee itself was far from impartial. Its nine members were all nominated by Prime Minister David Cameron, who has pushed for even greater surveillance powers.

'Justice' Secretary Chris Grayling has been speaking of the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill, which was expected to get Royal Assent today,

This bill extends the definition of extreme pornography to include the depiction of rape with vague definitions that will surely see hundreds of people likely to become victims when police make commonplace and routine computer searches.

The government has also increased the maximum penalty to 2 years for those who send internet insults that the authorities deem to be abusive.

The All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into anti-Semitism wants prosecutors to examine whether prevention orders like those used to restrict sex offenders' internet access could be used against people who make remarks taken as insulting about religion. The cross-party group highlighted in particular the use of anti-Semitic terms online.

The Parliamentary inquiry was set up following an unsurprising rise in incidents in July and August last year during Israel's onslaught against Gaza. The hashtags Hitler and genocide featured with high frequency , during the period.

The MPs said social media platforms had increasingly been used for the spread of anti-Semitism . Their report said the terms Hitler and Holocaust were among the top 35 phrases relating to Jews during the conflict.

Although the primary focus of the inquiry was anti-Semitism, one recommendation it made was that those who carry out any kind of hate crime should be prevented from using social media.

People convicted of Islamophobia and homophobia would be put on a blacklist to warn future employers of past misdemeanours under scary new proposals by Labour.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, will on Monday reveal a strategy against antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and insult of people with disabilities. The package includes making homophobic and disability hate crimes an aggravated criminal offence, ensuring that police treat such offences in the same way as racist hate crimes.

Cooper will outline changes to the criminal records framework whereby such offences will be clearly marked on the criminal records. Currently, records checks do not highlight homophobia, disability or transgender identity as a motivating factor in a conviction, and do not automatically appear in police data used for vetting applicants in sensitive vocations, such as those working with vulnerable people, including the disabled.

Measures to combat the role of social media in disseminating insults will also be unveiled. These include a review of police and guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service to ensure that crimes such as antisemitism on social networks such as Twitter are covered.

Labour would also introduce programmes in schools to tackle antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobic bullying and targeting of disabled children. We need to look at what more we can do to prevent discrimination, bigotry and hate taking hold in the first place, said Cooper.

The Scottish Labour MP Thomas Docherty has written to the British culture secretary inferring that Adolf Hitler's book, Mein Kampf should be banned.

He is calling for a national debate on whether the sale of the book should be banned in the UK.

Docherty has written to culture secretary Sajid Javid about the text, pointing out that it is currently rated as an Amazon bestseller . An edition of Mein Kampf is currently in fifth place on Amazon's history of Germany chart, in fourth place in its history references chart, and in 665th place overall. He wrote:

I think that there is a compelling case for a national debate on whether there should be limits on the freedom of expression.

And of course the inevitable '...BUT...' He said i n his letter there are:

Many who would argue that the publication of books as repulsive as Mein Kampf is the price of living in a democracy, and that by allowing academic study of books such as this, we ensure that our society understands better the causes of fascism and the origins of Nazism.

...BUT...

there are also many who would argue that such a book, which sought to incite racial hatred and fuel antisemitism, is too offensive to be made available.

And of course he doesn't want to be as vulgar as actually calling for a ban, he would much rather find somebody else to utter those words:

I'm not saying it should be banned, I am saying we should absolutely have a debate about whether or not it should be banned,

Could you have for argument's sake a system of academic licensing, a system in which institutes of learning were permitted to publish and teach it? Let's have the debate. Let's ask, in the 21st century, are there limits to free speech?

Scotland's new Licensing (Scotland) Bill is currently being discussed by the Scottish Parliament. A committee invited Professor Phil Hubbard, who has been following such issues, to speak about the experiences in England where similar control laws have been in place for some time.

He spoke of the expenses incurred by councils when their morality based decisions to ban table dancing clubs are formally challenged in the courts.

Hubbard noted that a one-size-fits-all policy for all Scottish councils would prevent the farcical situation in England and Wales where one council's decision to refuse a strip club licence can be successfully challenged - at great expense to the council - because a neighbouring council is more liberal.

National guidelines should be set on licensing fees - which range from £300 to £26,000 down south - and the amount of nudity permitted on show, he told Holyrood's Local Government Committee.

National guidelines were backed by the women's anti lap dancing campaign group, Zero Tolerance.

But the strip clubs' trade association warned against central government imposing a draconian regime on councils, arguing that the ban on religious comedy Life Of Brian in Glasgow or the ban on cult French porn movie Emmanuelle in some rural cinemas demonstrates the diverse moral sensibilities in Scotland's communities which should be respected.

Hubbard said:

I think the introduction of the Police And Crime Act 2009 in the UK was by and large farcical in terms of the way it was allowed to proceed.

What we have in England and Wales is a situation that I would like to see avoided in Scotland, where we have a licensing regime for these establishments in one local authority but not in a neighbouring one.

Fees for these establishments range from £300 to £26,000.

We have a situation where some local authorities will ban nudity and others will not.

The whole situation has led to a whole range of appeal cases and litigation in which legal unreasonableness and inconsistency have been raised as valid concerns, and some of these appeals have been upheld.

It has created a great deal of anxiety, expenditure and time for local authorities who have been left to evolve policies of their own.

He didn't appear to mention much about the suffocating uncertainty and the effects of arbitrary moral censorship on businesses trying to make a living.

Ed Miliband told the Andrew Marr Show he would not support new emergency legislation if it was modelled on the snooper's charter. He said he would adopt a cautious and considered approach in answer to calls for increased surveillance powers for the intelligence agencies.

Miliband was speaking after Lord West of Spithead, the former security minister in Gordon Brown's government, called for a revival of the data communications bill, known as the snooper's charter.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister, declined to offer support for the bill, proposed by the home secretary, Theresa May, that would give the police and security services the ability to track the email and internet use of UK citizens.

West told the same programme that it would be wrong to rush in legislation. But he criticised Clegg for forcing the government to abandon the data communications bill. He said:

Normally we stop plots because we get a heads up because we know people are talking to each other. That is why that intercept is so important. Most of the plots we have stopped in this country because of that initially indicator. If they are talking then it is really difficult to do anything about it.

Responding to calls to revive the communications data bill, aka the Snoopers Charter, Emma Carr, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said:

It is wholly unacceptable for this tragedy in Paris to be used as a means to call for a return of the Snoopers Charter. It is the wrong solution and would divert resources from focused surveillance operations at a time when the agencies are already struggling to cope with the volume of information available.

The Government is introducing legislation to solve the important problem of who is using a specific Internet Protocol address, but the powers within the Snoopers Charter go too far, as recognised by a number of Political figures and two Parliamentary committees.

Instead, the government should focus on the number of failures to continue monitoring those suspected of posing a threat. Those failures should be used as a blueprint to re-evaluate the decision making and record keeping processes of the intelligence agencies, as well as the training and resources allocated within the counter terrorism community.