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Council spy cases hit 1,000
a month
Gordon Rayner and Richard Alleyne
London
Telegraph
Friday, April 11, 2008
More than 1,000 covert surveillance operations are being launched
every month to investigate petty offences such as dog fouling,
under-age smoking and breaches of planning regulations.
Councils and other public bodies are using legislation designed
to combat terrorism in order to spy on people, obtain their telephone
records and find out who they are emailing. The full extent to
which local authorities take advantage of new powers given to
them by the Government came to light after a Dorset council admitted
spying for more than two weeks on a family it suspected of lying
on a school application form.
Privacy campaigners said figures obtained by The Daily Telegraph
showed the extent to which Britain has become a "surveillance
state", and likened the tactics employed by councils to the
Stasi secret police in the former East Germany.
(Article continues below)
Last year, councils and government departments made 12,494 applications
for "directed surveillance", according to figures released
by the Office of the Surveillance Commissioner. This was almost
double the number for the previous year.
In contrast, applications from police and other law enforcement
agencies fell during the same period, to about 19,000, and one
local government body admitted that councils and other public
bodies would soon carry out more surveillance than the police.
Full
article here.
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