Plebgate is one of those silly minor political spats in the UK involving a top UK politician who apparently got angry that police wouldn’t let him ride his bike out of the main gate at 10 Downing Street. The details really don’t matter. It’s just one of those political type stories that the press loves. But, now it’s come out that in investigating this incident, the Metropolitan Police appear to have abused an anti-terror law to obtain the phone records of journalists who reported on the story.

Specifically, the police made use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), the big anti-terror law in the UK that earlier this year we noted was abused to track down a government whistleblower. And this time it was used to get the phone records of Tom Newton Dunn, the political editor of The Sun, because the Sun reported on the whole Plebgate affair. The use of RIPA — which, again, is supposed to be for tracking down terrorists — let the police circumvent the law they’re supposed to use, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), which requires the police to actually go before a judge first when trying to access journalistic materials. With RIPA, the police could just claim they need the records, and boom, the phone company handed them over.

Read the Full Article: Source – Tech Dirt
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140903/06471928402/uk-police-abused-anti-terror-law-to-snoop-journalists-phone-records-concerning-minor-political-spat.shtml

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