By John Leyden for The Register. This story has
been reproduced with permission.
The UK courts currently do not allow it, though the practice is
commonly accepted in most Western countries.
As part of plans to review anti-terrorism legislation, outgoing
Home Secretary John Reid announced a review "into the potential
ramifications of allowing intercept to be used in terrorism court
cases".
The government is also pushing for police to be given the power
for longer pre-charge detention, beyond the current 28 day limit.
Government plans to push this limit to three months - a move
critics describe as equivalent to internment - previously
floundered and are highly controversial.
The latest anti-terrorism review will also consider giving
police enhanced powers to "stop and question" suspects, and courts
the ability to allow the support of terrorism to be considered as
an aggravating factor when imposing sentences for general offences,
such as credit card fraud.
Reid announced
the consultation in Parliament on Thursday. The government intends
to allow Parliament greater time to debate the proposed changes in
legislation, a decision that reflects the enhanced status for
parliamentary deliberations favoured by Prime Minister-elect Gordon
Brown, as well as previous failures to fast-track longer detention
of terror suspects past MPs and peers.
Lawful interception firm SS8 Networks welcomed the consultation.
MI5 has been reluctant to allow wiretap evidence to be admitted in
court fearing it would expose interception techniques. SS8 said
concerns that the move might compromise the effectiveness of police
and security services operations are misplaced.
"The use of wiretapping information as evidence in US court
systems has been going on for decades and has not jeopardised the
techniques and usefulness of this information," said Stephen
Gleave, marketing VP at SS8 Networks. "Wiretapping and the use of
wiretaps is a technique familiar to almost every adult on the
planet. How it is done is fairly common knowledge or can be readily
obtained and has not proven to reduce its effectiveness.
"Since the introduction of wiretapping legislation and the
standards that support it, law enforcement agencies – with the
proper legal authorisation and the cooperation of service providers
- can now execute wiretaps using standards-based, off the shelf
solutions. These solutions leverage wiretapping capabilities that
are now commonly built into most telecommunications and data
communications equipment to facilitate lawful intercept – itself
typically a condition of license for service providers."
SS8 added that, contrary to movie myths, the call data
information (who called who, when did they talk, where were they,
how long did they talk etc.) is often much more useful in the
investigation of crimes than the actual content of conversations.
In the US, the vast majority of real-time intercepts are for call
data only (130,000 per year) while intercepts that include voice
number less than 3,000, it added.
Gleave said: "Even if law enforcement is concerned with the
sensitive nature of lawful intercept technology and revealing their
methods, the most basic of information, readily available off just
about any switching equipment, proves to be by far the most
relevant and useful."
© The
Register 2007
