Revealed: British councils used Ripa to secretly spy on public

> Critics of the spying legislation say the government said it would only be used when absolutely necessary to protect British people from extreme threats.

All these councils used to this kind of spying before RIPA. The purpose of a lot of RIPA is to bring that under some kind of regulatory control. And, as this article says, when councils continued to use RIPA for minor nuisance the law was changed.

> The local authority also detailed the use of Ripa following complaint about the accumulation of rubbish in a rear garden, claiming the perpetrator was a “serial fly tipper”. The council deployed a “covert camera” in the upstairs, bedroom window of another property, which gathered evidence of what was happening.

The reason we know about this intrusive surveillance is because under RIPA:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/part/II

An authorised person has to give authority for the surveillance; they can only do so in some situations; a record has to be kept.

The UK has more CCTV than anywhere else in the world. It's entirely right that they should be brought under some kind of control.

I agree that people saying stuff like this...

> The deputy leader of the London borough of Bromley said he believed the legislation was far too restrictive, arguing that the victims of crime understood that filming evidence that could aid prosecutions was a “minor infringement of the perpetrators so called civil liberties”.

...don't help my case, and it's really concerning to me that he's not giving due weight to the serious interference with people's human right to privacy.

If this article is trying to suggest that the new IPA is concerning, well, I agree, it is very worrying, but the article isn't persuasive because RIPA law changed when the government saw it being abused.