IT police welcome Blunkett's back-down on snooping

Home Secretary David Blunkett's high profile retreat on extending snooping powers has been broadly welcomed from inside the high-tech law enforcement community.

At a conference in London today on Modernising Criminal Justice, speakers and delegates agreed restraint is needed when putting forward new policy directing how innovations in IT could be used in the fight against crime.

James McVicar, director of home affairs for SchlumbergerSema, said the home office's proposals had gone too far: "Everyone recognises there are civil liberties issues here, and it is the role of business to try to inform policy making, not to drive it."

However, he claimed increased use of IT by the police could actually work in favour of those concerned about erosions of privacy. He added: "The level of security and privacy gained from encryption tools is far more than could ever be guaranteed from paper-based files. The ability to see who has looked at a document and when, means files cannot be tampered with.

"This is about using IT to manage access controls."

Even Len Hynds, head of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, charged with solving serious cybercrime, admitted a line had to be drawn in giving police powers.

He said: "It is wrong to give the suggestion that law enforcement agencies want blanket access to all electronic data for all times - this would place a huge burden on the telecoms and ISP industry and is not in anyone's interest.

"However, from our perspective, we do want to ensure we don't have a denigration of power from that which already exists in the offline world."

However, others were more critical of the government's stance. While SchlumbergerSema says it wants civil liberties to be respected, it promotes within government the kind of information sharing between departments that has got privacy activists so upset.

Will Hutton, prominent economist and chief executive of The Work Foundation was also speaking at the conference and said: "The very joined-up-ness of government being promoted by many does undoubtedly raise civil liberties issues. I'm quite happy for the police to use IT to increase its efficiency within itself, but do I want then to share information with other departments? - it's a much harder question."

Earlier this week home secretary David Blunkett backed down from proposals to extend the legal monitoring of certain communications data of members of the public without a court order after massive public resistance.