Oversight or Theatre? Surveillance and Democratic Accountability

Description

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Background

Britain’s laws on surveillance, interception of communications and other covert activities of the security and intelligence services are widely regarded as unsatisfactory and inadequate. The government has published a draft Investigatory Powers bill which aims to rectify this, by placing all the powers deemed necessary by the state under one statute. The draft bill has been widely discussed, and is currently being scrutinised by a Joint Committee of the Houses of Commons and Lords. Given the scope and extent of the legislation, and the torrent of comment that it has already attracted, it would be impossible to encompass all aspects of the draft bill in a single day, so we have selected five areas for consideration, in the hope that the resulting discussion can usefully be fed back into public debate and Parliamentary scrutiny of the legislation.

 

Contributions to this topic by the Technology & Democracy project so far:

• Julian Huppert, Open Democracy article: The Investigatory Powers Bill is our chance to publicly set the rules around surveillance
• Nora Ni Loideain, Open Democracy article: The UK Investigatory Powers Bill – one step forward, two steps back
• Nora Ni Loideain, Written Evidence to Joint Committee on Human Rights on IP Bill
• David Vincent and John Naughton, Written Evidence to Joint Committee on IP Bill