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This page considers global and national data interception.

It covers -

• introduction
• Australia
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• USA

The antecedents and shape of Echelon are discussed here.

    introduction

[under development]

    Australia

[under development]

    New Zealand

[under development]

    United Kingdom

Until 1985, the interception of communications by the state was wholly outside the law. The official position was that such eavesdropping took place only on the authority of a warrant issued by the secretary of state when it was needed for the detection of serious crime or for safeguarding the security of the state. Even then, various other procedural hurdles had (supposedly) to be negotiated. But there was no mechanism for ensuring that the state stayed within its own rules, and the 1970s and early 1980s were full of rumours of excess on the part of MI5, directed at CND, the trade unions (especially the NUM) as well as more obvious Cold War opponents. The purpose behind all this surveillance, in the national security arena at least, was not to build a case against suspects under the ordinary criminal law: it was pure intelligence gathering, intended to inform the advance planning of state strategists, to disrupt the operations of the other side, or to permit the effective conducting of psychological games and the playing of dirty tricks. There was never any question of using the material in court.
This approach had to change when legal regulation was forced on the authorities by a decision of the European Court of Human Rights, in the case of Malone v. United Kingdom (1985). The Interception of Communication Act 1985 that followed put the whole matter on a legal basis, setting out various criteria for lawful interceptions and providing a measure of accountability, but at the same time going to immense trouble to exclude the courts from any meaningful role in the process. Officials were worried not only about their now lawful intercepts being referred to in court, but about their continuing illegal operations being held against them. Amazingly, Section 9 of the act provided that in any proceedings before a court no evidence was to be adduced and no questions were to be asked in cross-examination which tended to suggest that an interception had taken place, with or without a warrant.
This continued insulation of surveillance from the disciplines of the criminal process was controversial almost from the start. Judges didn’t like it, particularly when terrorism came to replace Communism as the bogey-man in chief. In 1996, in a report which was otherwise sympathetic to the authorities, Lord Lloyd of Berwick called for a reform in the law to allow such evidence to be led in national security cases. Not only did the government reject this view, it re-enacted the prohibition in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

    Canada

[under development]

    United States

[under development]








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