Britain already has more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world, and a four million strong DNA database that contains details of thousands of UK residents who have committed no crime.
Should the state be granted its apparent desire to have access to every single phone call made, every last text message and email sent, and each website visited by anyone in Britain, it would be possessed of an arsenal of surveillance techniques that would have been the envy of the classic totalitarian regimes of the past. Continue reading
The argument put forward by the West Midlands and Surrey forces in putting out a £1.5bn contract for greater private sector involvement in policing is that it would allow private companies to carry out routine and repetitive tasks at cheaper rates whilst allowing highly trained and professional police officers to concentrate more time on key activities which require their skills and expertise. An enticing idea, but in practice full of pitfalls. 
It’s not just the well-reported antics of Mark Kennedy that call in question the activities of undercover policing against political and protest groups. It’s the almost total lack of accountability about the clandestine operations of police spies over the last 40 years. The HMIC report on this episode draws attention to Kennedy’s failure to “follow codes of practice for undercover officers” or to report his sexual activities with those he was targeting, but fails to call attention to the much more serious charge that his handlers or the CPS, or both, deliberately ignored evidence that Kennedy had provided, in order to secure the false conviction of 100 protestors at a power station in Nottinghamshire. 
Establishing an inquiry into setting up a new code of police-media ethics, as Theresa May proposed yesterday, whilst welcome, is not going to resolve the profound derelictions of duty recently exposed in police behaviour at the highest level: failing in the face of abundant evidence which they themselves held to re-open the hacking inquiry in 2009; and taking bribes estimated at £130,000 for illegally passing on private information. 