Police plan to use military style drones
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The Herti (pictured) is a pilotless aircraft developed by the arms manufacturer BAE systems. According to BAE it is a "highly adaptable, fully autonomous, platform-based solution providing robust, cost-effective surveillance and reconnaissance capability to support a range of military and civil requirements.”
In a recent article the Guardian has claimed that BAE have drawn up with various police forces and agencies a list of potential ‘civil requirements’ including “road and railway monitoring, search and rescue, event security and covert urban surveillance.” They'd like to have the unmanned planes in use in policing operations within the next five years.
>How 'charming' will the Met be at this year's climate camp?
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>Police surveillance reaches new heights?
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According to the BBC police have planned to use an 'unmanned small drone aircraft' to video and monitor this weekends BNP meet, or at least the protests taking place against it. A couple of months ago drones were also used to spy on the solstice celebrations at Stonehenge.
>FIT teams admit they are out to disrupt, not just to watch.
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That was the view of a FIT co-ordinator of the operation at Kingsnorth Climate Camp last year.
A FIT Silver commander also commended the way that Kent police had used their ANPR (automatic number plate reader) to pick up protesters vehicles so that they could be stopped, questioned and searched. “an innovative use of legislation for disruption”, he applauded.
These are the remarkably frank comments contained in the Structured Debrief of Climate Camp policing. This was produced by the NPIA, the National Policing Improvement Agency, the structure which is supposed to spread best practice around the police forces.
In this case the best practice appears to be using legislation other than for the purposes it was intended, and doing their best to ‘disrupt’ protest.
The accompanying report from South Yorkshire police confirms the involvement of FIT in directing stop and search, and reveals that the massive collection of personal details through stop and search forms almost proved too much for police resources. “The capacity of the intelligence cell was clearly challenged when the scale of PACE/1 form submission became a reality.”
Stop and search legislation was written with the express intention of NOT allowing police to collect personal details in this way. So this must be yet another example of police interpreting legislation in an ‘innovative’ way.
Not only do the police feel confident in being able to bend the law as they see fit, they are arrogant enough to brag about it in a public document. Astounding.
>On the buses
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FIT and evidence gatherers at the Brighton demo were given an exceptionally hard time. Evidence gatherers were pushed out of the crowd as it assembled near Brighton pier, and their cameras were the focus of constant attention from that point onwards. Photographers crowded them, demonstrators squirted water at them, FITwatchers blocked them. So presumably, these two took it upon themselves to escape from all that and hide on the top deck of a bus where no-one would notice them.
There is just one problem with that decision – it quite possibly meant that their filming of the march from this point was unlawful.
Their problem is RIPA, The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. This defines covert surveillance as follows:
(a) surveillance is covert if, and only if, it is carried out in a manner that is calculated to ensure that persons who are subject to the surveillance are unaware that it is or may be taking place;
This type of surveillance is perfectly lawful if the police have justified it and obtained the appropriate authorisation. It is, apparently, quite an onerous process. According to an ACPO review it takes on average five hours to fill in the forms for an authorisation. Somehow I suspect that these two just didn’t bother to do that.
Normal FIT surveillance escapes all this because it is OVERT rather than COVERT. This means, according to the Met, “officers should clearly identify themselves as police officers and not hide the fact that they are filming”*.
COVERT filming, as defined by RIPA, carried out without authorisation, is of questionable legality. I am sure Sussex police, concerned as they are to prevent breaches of the law, will now conduct a thorough enquiry, discipline those involved and destroy the footage taken. Of course.
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