This archival study of the interception warrant offers a history of a secret governmental practice. Despite the lack of a coherent archival record of interception warrants, some traces remain. They reveal the changing organisational structure in which secret surveillance was operationalised. Moreover, recurrent memos and policy notes reveal the organisational steps taken to preserve official...
Tag: <span>Bernard Keenan</span>
The paradoxical regulation of mass surveillance in Britain, 2013-2016
After the Snowden revelations, Britain’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an administrative panel dealing with illegal interception of communication, heard a series of complaints from NGOs. The Tribunal sat in public, treating the complaints as hypothetical scenarios: so-called ‘assumed facts’. The assumed facts enabled legal argument to proceed while protecting government secrecy. It determined in two...