This week BBC South released the results of its investigation into the use of special surveillance powers by local councils in southern England. These powers -- that allow active surveillance, phone monitoring and email interception by local councils to combat crimes -- were created to help in the fight against domestic terrorism and similar serious offenses withing the United Kingdom. In practice, however, the BBC found that many local councils have spent a significant amount of time putting their constituencies under surveillance in the hunt for comparatively trivial offenses.
Highlights include:
- A family being under constant surveillance, including people casing their home and following them, to determine if they actually lived in the school district into which they were enrolling their children
- In-depth undercover investigations to prevent dog fouling (that is, people letting their dogs poop in public parks)
- Catching people harvesting clams from unauthorized sites
The concept of your city or county government actually tailing you, wiretapping you, and reading your email just to find out if you're letting your dog mess up the local park likely seems patently ridiculous to an American reader, but it's an excellent example of power creep. It's mostly human nature. If you're given a plate full of food, you eat it, and if you're given a tool, you feel strange letting it sit around unused.
This is why the arguments in the US that torture should be legal under some circumstances are so dangerous and corrosive. If a tool is approved for use some of the time, both the opportunity and the pressure are there to apply the tool to other situations.
It is ridiculous to think of using active surveillance teams to check that someone isn't fibbing about which school district their kids belong in, but nonetheless, that happened. You really don't want to be the person who disappears one day off the street on your way to work because an administrator decided that they haven't made a warrantless seizure of someone in a while -- and that's why it's best that these tools never, ever be legal.