Police to hack your PC

Police have been given the power to hack into personal computers without a court warrant and the Home Office faces the threat of a legal challenge after granting permission to allow Police to do this. Ministers are also drawing up plans to allow police across the EU to collect information from computers in Britain. The moves will further claims of a "Big Brother Society" where the often spurious accounts of combating terrorism and the recently promoted public enemy number, the paedophile, are used to allow police access to ever larger amounts of private information

Hacking – known as "remote searching" – has been quietly adopted by police across Britain following the development of technology to access computers' contents at a distance. Police say it is vital for tracking cyber-criminals and paedophiles and is used sparingly but civil liberties groups are worried that its usage will be expanded without any form of control.

Remote searching can be achieved by sending an email containing a virus to a suspect's computer which then transmits information about email contents and web-browsing habits to a distant surveillance team. Alternatively, "key-logging" devices can be inserted into a computer that relay details of each key hit by its owner. Detectives can also monitor the contents of a suspect's computer hard-drive via a wireless network. Users who are worried about this might want to check incoming emails and refuse any which look suspicious; set their email client to strip out HTML and receive only text (less pretty, but less prone to hacking) and to make sure their Network is encrypted. User may also want to think about using proxy servers as an additional layer of protection againts intrusion and access to your IP address.

The police say that computer hacking has to be approved by a chief constable, who must be satisfied the action is proportionate to the crime being investigated. But the recent record of the police in a propotionate reaction to a situation will not bring comfort to many users!

Dominic Grieve, shadow Home Secretary, asked how it would work in practice and what safeguards will be in place.

Police carried out 194 hacking operations in 2007-08 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including 133 in private homes, 37 in offices and 24 in hotel rooms. The spokesman said such surveillance was regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

The Government faces criticism over the erosion of civil liberties on a series of fronts. It is working on plans for a giant "big brother" database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made by everyone in the United Kingdom.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain's policy of retaining samples from people never convicted of a crime – including children – breaches human rights.

I wonder what Dixon of Dock Green would have said? "Evening all!"