POLICE HACK your personal computer without a warrant

The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into peoples personal computers without a warrant. The move, which follows a decision by the European Unions council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives a coach and horses through privacy laws. The hacking is known as remote searching. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someones PC at his home, office or hotel room. Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging. Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property. The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someones UK computer and pass over any material gleaned. However, opposition MPs and civil liberties groups say that the broadening of such intrusive surveillance powers should be regulated by a new act of parliament and court warrants. They point out that in contrast to the legal safeguards for searching a suspects home, police undertaking a remote search do not need to apply to a magistrates court for a warrant. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the human rights group, said she would challenge the legal basis of the move. These are very intrusive powers as intrusive as someone busting down your door and coming into your home, she said. The public will want this to be controlled by new legislation and judicial authorisation. Without those safeguards its a devastating blow to any notion of personal privacy. She said the move had parallels with the warrantless police search of the House of Commons office of Damian Green, the Tory MP: Its like giving police the power to do a Damian Green every day but to do it without anyone even knowing you were doing it. Richard Clayton, a researcher at Cambridge Universitys computer laboratory, said that remote searches had been possible since 1994, although they were very rare. An amendment to the Computer Misuse Act 1990 made hacking legal if it was authorised and carried out by the state.