Squatters' Rights?

It could potentially criminalise swathes of homeless people and cost over £700 million to implement. A controversial clause that will outlaw squatting in empty residential properties for the first time in England and Wales was given the green light in the House of Lords late last month. The government argues the change is essential to protect distressed property owners. Amid rising unemployment and the worst housing crisis in a generation, however, there are concerns that it might further marginalise some of society’s most vulnerable.

Under existing law, if squatters move in to an occupied home (for example when the residents are on holiday) police already have the powers to immediately remove them. The new law will broaden the scope of these powers, and will extend to residential properties that are empty and not being lived in. It will allow property owners to get police to, without applying for an eviction notice, arrest and remove squatters, who will be made to face a maximum one year jail sentence or £5000 fine.

“Ultimately the best way to end squatting will not be through fines and criminal sanction but by ensuring all homeless people, not just those deemed a ‘priority’, get the help they need,” says Duncan Shrubsole, director of policy and external affairs at homeless charity Crisis.

“We are obviously disappointed that the government is going ahead with its plans to criminalise squatting in residential buildings given the concerns that Crisis, with the support of Baroness Miller and other parliamentarians, have consistently raised as the likely impact on homeless people.”

The reform will represent a fundamental shift in how squatting is dealt with across the country, bringing an end to the long-held principles of “squatters’ rights”.

Historically in England and Wales, squatting in empty residential properties has been considered a civil dispute between the squatters and the landlord. As long as a squatter has not broken in and remains in the house, they can’t be forcibly removed and property owners have to get a court order to get people out. Within months that will no longer be the case.

“I have been contacted time and time again by MPs and constituents about the appalling impact that squatting can have on their homes, businesses and local communities,” said Conservative justice minister Crispin Blunt in a statement last year. “This is not media hype. It can and does really happen, and when it does it can be highly stressful for the owner or lawful occupier of the property concerned.

“It is not only the cost and length of time it takes to evict squatters that angers property owners, it is also the cost of the cleaning and repair bill which follows eviction. While the property owner might literally be left picking up the pieces, the squatters have gone on their way, possibly to squat in somebody else’s property.”

But a number of groups have expressed serious concerns about the ramifications of criminalising squatting, the provision for which is contained in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. A survey conducted by Crisis last year showed 39% of homeless people had resorted to squatting at some point, a factor that prompted organisations including the Law Society, The Criminal Bar Association and housing charity Shelter to argue against criminalisation.

“A new criminal offence of squatting is unnecessary,” says John Wotton, president of the Law Society of England and Wales. “Squatting is not a major problem and where it does occur, there are a range of laws both civil and criminal that are adequate to deal with it.”

While the Criminal Prosecution Service has backed the new law, opposition has come from a number of unexpected quarters. In a speech made before the House of Lords on 27 March, Lord Paul Strasburger – formerly the director of Safe Estates, a security firm tasked with keeping squatters out of empty properties – launched an attack on the part of the Bill dealing with squatting.

He said: “This clause is a blunt instrument because its unintended consequence – and I sincerely hope that it is an unintended consequence – is to protect unscrupulous property owners who keep properties vacant for years for purely speculative reasons and, in the process, prevent homeless people having somewhere to live.”

Though squatting is set to be criminalised in empty residential properties, campaigners have claimed a small victory in that the government is not pursing the criminalisation of squatting in commercial properties (such as, for instance, disused warehouses). Assurances have been given by ministers that those who occupy abandoned or dilapidated non-residential buildings will not be committing the new offence, and will be dealt with through the civil eviction-order process. The government has also pledged that students who occupy academic buildings or workers who stage sit-ins to protest against an employer will not be committing any crime.

“That was quite a big concession to win along the way,” says Joseph Blake, a spokesperson for squatters’ campaign group Squash. “But it was a struggle to get what is a serious piece of legislation heard properly – it was debated late at night and never properly scrutinised.

“I think it fundamentally comes to a lack of democracy in this country. Now what we may see is thousands of people becoming criminals at some point, in the middle of what is one of the worst housing crises this country has ever seen.”

There are currently over 700,000 empty homes in England, 279,000 of which have been vacant for over six months. In March new official statistics revealed that the number of people classed as homeless has jumped by 14%, with 48,510 households accepted as homeless by local authorities in 2011. The increase is the biggest in nine years and was described by Shelter as “a shocking reminder of the divide between the housing haves and have nots in this country."

The government has vowed to “tackle the root causes of homelessness, to provide affordable homes and to bring more empty homes back into use” to counteract any negative impact that there may be on homeless people through the implementation of the squatting crackdown. Until it meets its words with actions, however, the chances are squatting will continue unabated well into the future – regardless of the consequences.

“Squatting is a response to the housing crisis that we’re in – properties remain empty and our homelessness rates are rising,” Blake says, resolutely. “The two things go together. People will continue squatting if that’s the desperate last resort for them.”

Elected Mayors

It has been billed by some as the most significant constitutional change England has faced in generations. Next month, a referendum will be held in ten cities across the country to determine whether council leaders will replaced by elected mayors. It could mean that, rather than councils picking who is in charge, more people than ever before will have the chance to directly decide who their local leader is. Advocates of the reform say it will bring about greater democracy and more regional control – but not everyone is convinced.

Come 3 May voters in Leeds, Wakefield, Manchester, Sheffield and Bradford will be among those to go to the polls. Birmingham, Nottingham, Coventry, Bristol and Newcastle will also vote, while Liverpool and Leicester have already chosen to switch to the new system without holding a referendum. The government is keen for cities to adopt elected mayors, which it says will lead to more power devolved locally. However, critics claim they are being pressured into making a change that is not necessarily a good thing.

“I’m sceptical about mayors,” says professor Alan Harding, director of the University of Manchester’s Institute for Political and Economic Governance. “I think it would be a complete and utter waste of time for Manchester, which has been run perfectly effectively for donkey’s years.

“There are certain places in the world which have directly elected mayors, and I don’t think you could say hand on heart it makes a decisive difference to how those places function. At the end of the day it’s not the position that makes the difference – it’s the quality of the people who occupy the position and how they make use of the opportunities that they’ve got.”

Since the Local Government Act was introduced by New Labour in 2000, 16 English towns have adopted elected mayors, ranging from London to Bedford, Middlesbrough and Watford. But the current government, as part of its 2011 Localism Act, wants to expand the system across all of the country’s major cities, with May’s mandatory referendums an integral part of that process.

“I’m really enthusiastic about this because I profoundly believe we should be moving our country to having more directly elected mayors in our big cities,” prime minister David Cameron said in a speech at 10 Downing Street last week. “I know it is a big cultural change for Britain, it is a big move for us, and it is absolutely going to be up to the people of those cities to make that decision, but I very much hope we will get some yes votes across our country.”

Thinktank the Institute for Government (IFG) has also backed the push towards having more elected mayors. It believes the change will lead to more funding and independence handed over to cities, with increased stability and better leadership.

“Mayors are likely to bring significant benefits – in terms of visibility, stability and responsiveness to the electorate,” says Tom Gash, programme director at the IFG. “Mayors are elected every four years by tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of voters. Council leaders are chosen by other councillors and can be ousted at virtually any point if they can’t keep these councillors happy.”

Statistics produced by the IFG show that 38% of people questioned nationally want a directly elected mayor rather than a council leader. But a separate poll earlier in March revealed 62% were unaware of the May referendums, with 90% saying they had been given little or no information about it. As a likely result of this, during an elected mayors referendum in Salford in January, just 18.1% of the 171,000 eligible voters took part.

According to Steve Connor, chief executive of Manchester PR firm Creative Concern, there is little appetite for the change in his home city because it would not offer any tangible benefit. Connor recently authored a letter, published in the Manchester Evening News and signed by academics, artists and businessmen, calling elected mayors a “bad deal”.

“For Manchester it’s a really bad option,” Connor says, “because we’ve got ten local authorities, not one, and we’ve got Greater Manchester, which is the scale at which our city works.

“If it was one elected mayor for the whole of Manchester – that would be a different issue. But this referendum is about a mayor just for the Manchester city council area, and it’s crackers.”

In London Boris Johnson is mayor of Greater London, which puts him in charge of all 32 of the capital’s boroughs. But Manchester is being offered an elected mayor who would only be responsible for the City of Manchester (one borough), as opposed to Greater Manchester in its entirety (ten boroughs).

“Elected mayors should be for larger areas – like London – they shouldn’t be for smaller areas,” Connor says. “There’s no demand for it, we haven’t asked for it, and yet it’s been forced on us.”

Last week the BBC quoted an unnamed Downing Street adviser saying Manchester would be at a competitive disavantage if its citizens didn’t vote yes on 3 May. In Wakefield council leader Peter Box has accused central government of engaging in “Alice in Wonderland politics” for asking people to vote on something that they are not fully informed about. Meanwhile, an anti-mayors campaign group called “Vote No to a Power Freak” has been founded by politicians in Birmingham who claim elected mayors will lead to corruption and a form of dictatorship.

“Concentrating power into the hands of one individual makes it easy for them to do things that mean other people aren’t consulted – unless they are wealthy people or high up in the bureaucracy of the council,” says John Hemming MP, a Liberal Democrat involved with the Vote No to a Power Freak campaign. “It leads towards corruption, because power corrupts – the more power you give people the more corruption there is.

“If you think politics should be a celebrity contest once every four years and otherwise people do what they feel like, then great – vote for it. But if you think politics is about policies and trying to make a society where everybody is taken into account – then oppose it.”

In Liverpool the prevailing attitude is more positive. The city’s council decided to adopt an elected mayor without holding a referendum after being promised a £130m funding package from Whitehall in return, including a £75m economic development grant and a low tax enterprise zone in the north of the city.

“It’s time to embrace mayoral politics,” says Liam Fogarty, a former BBC journalist running as an independent candidate for Liverpool mayor. “It will be different to the sort of politics that we’re used to, I think and I hope. A mayoral figure provides clear visible leadership – there’s no hiding place for a mayor – and I think that makes for a stronger democracy.”

Among the other candidates who will be running for mayor of Liverpool are Herbert Howe, a celebrity hairdresser, and Tony Mulhearn, the former Militant leader who has pledged to reverse all council cuts should he get elected. Phil Redmond, the creator of TV series Brookside, Grange Hill and Hollyoaks, finally ruled himself out of the race last week, after much speculation that he would stand.

“At the moment we have this whole kind of alphabet soup of people taking important decisions that are not visible or held to account – quangos, joint boards, partnerships, multi agency agreements,” Fogarty says. “If the price of accountability is the odd eccentric, I think that’s a fair price to pay.”

The Secretive World of Lobbying

Scandal is a word often associated with the business of lobbying. Involving individuals and organisations trying to influence the opinions of politicians, the practice has been tainted by controversies since the notorious cash-for-questions debacle in the 1990s, when MPs accepted sums of money in return for tabling parliamentary questions. In recent months, following the resignation of Tory defence secretary Liam Fox over his links with shadowy lobbyists, it has once again become the focus of intense public scrutiny. But soon, new reforms could be about to clean up the system.

The scale of the problem has long been recognised by those in government. Before he became prime minister in 2010, David Cameron gave an often quoted speech on “secret corporate lobbying” and issued a stark warning. “It arouses people’s worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works,” he said. “It is the next big scandal waiting to happen.”

Unfortunately for Cameron, his prediction soon came true. Since coming to power, aside from the revelations concerning Fox late last year, a series of investigations have shed light on a murky trail that leads straight to the door of the coalition government itself. In December, undercover recordings were published of executives from Bell Pottinger, one of the country’s largest lobbying firms, boasting about the access they had to the prime minister while claiming they could “facilitate” meetings with powerful government figures. Owned by Conservative peer Lord Bell, the company is known to have worked for a host of countries with poor human rights records – including Libya, Syria, Sri Lanka and Rwanda – to help improve their reputations and build potential links with overseas governments.

“Lobbying in itself isn’t a crime,” says Tamasin Cave of the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency (ALT). “But the situation we have at the moment in this country is that we have an unregulated, mainly commercial lobbying industry... It is distorting the democratic process.

“Organisations don’t spend this money [on lobbying] because it has no effect. They are paying for influence and access, and that we see as a problem. So we’re calling for transparency regulations; you can’t stop lobbying but what you can do is make it open to public scrutiny.”

The central issue is that the lobbying industry, estimated to be worth around £2 billion in the UK, is currently self-regulatory and is not obliged by law to publish any details about its activities. Though charity groups and campaigners also often lobby government, large and wealthy corporations (and foreign governments) can have a disproportionate influence by paying well-connected private lobbying firms like Bell Pottinger millions to directly pressurise politicians – yet the public is never made aware about the full extent of the pressure being
exerted.

To curb this lack of transparency, the government is expected to put forward plans – perhaps as soon as this week – for the introduction of a mandatory lobbying register, which would bring details about who is lobbying who into the public domain. Many believe, however, that much more needs to be done.

ALT, a campaign group formed by a coalition of 15 organisations including Greenpeace and Action Aid, is calling for a number of regulations to be introduced that it believes would make lobbying far more accountable. Aside from a mandatory register, it would like to see all meetings and correspondence between lobbyists and MPs recorded, along with enforceable ethics rules banning the employment of government officials or their relatives for lobbying purposes.

“We think that the public should be able to see who is lobbying who, what they are lobbying about, and how much money in particular is being spent on that piece of lobbying,” Cave says. “We’re behind the times on this issue in this country, and yet we have one of the biggest lobbying industries in the world.”

Among the lobbyists themselves, there is far from consensus on the issue of statutory legislation. Some believe the industry’s self-regulatory body, the UK Public Affairs Council (UKPAC), is doing a good job, but others disagree. This was made clear after the Bell Pottinger scandal, when one professional lobbyists’ group, the Public Relations Consultants Association, withdrew from UKPAC, saying it lacked “credibility and competence” and had failed to do its job.

For Mark Adams OBE, the issues are not so clear cut. A freelance lobbyist and former private secretary to two prime ministers (Tony Blair and John Major), Adams, who runs a blog called Stand Up For Lobbying, argues statutory regulation could in fact make lobbying even less transparent than it already is.

“I remain to be convinced that statutory regulation will make any difference,” he says. “There are a lot of people who’ve argued that self regulation isn’t perfect, but I don’t think any system of statutory regulation is perfect either. What the government is planning to propose with their statutory register – that doesn’t go anywhere near as far as the various self-regulatory bodies already do.”

The latest scandals that have engulfed the lobbying industry have not convinced Adams new laws introduced by the government are necessary. He is also critical of groups calling for stricter accountability.

“We probably wouldn’t have invented the wheel if we were running government in the way that some of these proponents of transparency are calling for,” he says. “I think some of the more extreme so-called transparency measures would actually do more to push lobbying into the shadows than anything the industry has done over the last 20 years to bring it out of the shadows.

“If you have a system of recording every official meeting, nothing of any real interest will be discussed there – it’ll be discussed behind closed doors. What will happen is ministers and MPs will ‘bump into’ people in the margins of conferences, seminars and meetings, or perhaps during lunch – we’re not going to record every lunch.”

In other countries such as America and Canada, lobbying has long been regulated by the state, forcing those who are attempting to influence government to enter on to a centrally maintained, publicly accessible database. In Britain these details often remain undisclosed, and are only uncovered after specific details are requested from government departments under the Freedom of Information Act. One such request recently revealed that a report by the coalition rejecting tougher controls on large pub companies was partly written by powerful industry lobby group the British Beer and Pub Association – with sections of the report copied and pasted directly from industry proposals.

“When we’re at a situation when we have an austerity agenda, and we’ve got cuts left right and centre, it’s important to know whose interests are being served,” says James Graham of reform group Unlock Democracy. “No law in itself can actually transform things – it’s got to come with a culture shift. But what new legislation will do is put the onus on questioning where that culture shift hasn’t happened, and put those individuals in the spotlight.”

Governments turn to hacking techniques for surveillance of citizens

In a luxury Washington, DC, hotel last month, governments from around the world gathered to discuss surveillance technology they would rather you did not know about. The annual Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) World Americas conference is a kind of mecca for representatives from intelligence agencies and law enforcement. But to the media or members of the public, it is strictly off limits.

Gone are the days when mere telephone wiretaps satisfied authorities’ intelligence needs. Behind the cloak of secrecy at the ISS World conference, tips are shared about the latest advanced “lawful interception” methods used to spy on citizens – computer hacking, covert bugging and GPS tracking. Smartphones, email, instant message services and free chat services such as Skype have revolutionised communication. This has been matched by the development of increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology.

Among the pioneers is Hampshire-based Gamma International, a core ISS World sponsor. In April, Gamma made headlines when Egyptian activists raided state security offices in Cairo and found documents revealing Gamma had in 2010 offered Hosni Mubarak's regime spy technology named FinFisher. The "IT intrusion" solutions offered by Gamma would have enabled authorities to infect targeted computers with a spyware virus so they could covertly monitor Skype conversations and other communications.

The use of such methods is more commonly associated with criminal hacking groups, who have used spyware and trojan horse viruses to infect computers and steal bank details or passwords. But as the internet has grown, intelligence agencies and law enforcement have adopted similar techniques.

“Traditionally communications flowed through phone companies, but consumers are increasingly using communications that operate outwith their jurisdiction. This changes the way interception is carried out … the current method of choice would seem to be spyware, or trojan horses,” says Chris Soghoian, a Washington-based surveillance and privacy expert. “There’s now a thriving outsourced surveillance industry and they are there to meet the needs and wants of countries from around the world, including those who are more – and less – respectful to human rights.”

In 2009, while a government employee, Soghoian attended ISS World. He made recordings of seminars and later published them online – which led him to be the subject of an investigation and, ultimately, cost him his Federal Trade Commission job. The level of secrecy around the sale of such technology by western companies, he believes, is cause for alarm.

“When there are five or six conferences held in closed locations every year, where telecommunications companies, surveillance companies and government ministers meet in secret to cut deals, buy equipment, and discuss the latest methods to intercept their citizens’ communications – that I think meets the level of concern,” he says. “They say that they are doing it with the best of intentions. And they say that they are doing it in a way that they have checks and balances and controls to make sure that these technologies are not being abused. But decades of history show that surveillance powers are abused – usually for political purposes.”

Another company that annually attends ISS World is Italian surveillance developer Hacking Team. A small, 35-employee software house based in Milan, Hacking Team's technology – which costs over £500,000 for a “medium-sized installation” – gives authorities the ability to break into computers or smartphones, allowing targeted systems to be remotely controlled. It can secretly enable the microphone on a targeted computer and even take clandestine snapshots using its webcam, sending the pictures and audio along with any other information – such as emails, passwords and word documents – back to the authorities for inspection. The smartphone version of the software has the ability to track a person’s movements via GPS as well as perform a function described as “remote audio spy”, effectively turning the phone into a bug without its user’s knowledge. The venture capital-backed company boasts that its technology can be used "country-wide" to monitor over 100,000 targets simultaneously, and cannot be detected by anti-virus software.

“Information such as address books or SMS messages or images or documents might never leave the device. Such data might never be sent to the network. The only way to get it is to hack the terminal device, take control of it and finally access to the relevant data,” says David Vincenzetti, founding partner of Hacking Team, who adds that the company has sold its software in 30 countries across five continents. "Our investors have set up a legal committee whose goal is to promptly and continuously advise us on the status of each country we are talking to. The committee takes into account UN resolutions, international treaties, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International recommendations."

Three weeks ago Berlin-based hacker collective the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) exposed covert spy software used by German police forces similar to that offered by Hacking Team. The "Bundestrojaner [federal trojan]” software, which state officials confirmed had been used, gave law enforcement the power to gain complete control over an infected computer. The revelation prompted an outcry in Germany, as the use of such methods is strictly regulated under the country’s constitutional law. (A court ruling in 2008 established a “basic right to the confidentiality and integrity of information-technological systems”.)

“Lots of what intelligence agencies have been doing in the last few years is basically computer infiltration, getting data from computers and installing trojans on other people’s computers,” says Frank Rieger, a CCC spokesman. “It has become part of the game, and what we see now is a diffusion of intelligence methods into normal police work. We’re seeing the same mindset creeping in. They’re using the same surreptitious methods to gain knowledge without remembering that they are the police and they need to follow due process.”

In the UK there is legislation in place governing the use of all intrusive surveillance. Covert intelligence gathering by law enforcement or government agencies is currently regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which states that to intercept communications a warrant must be authorised by the Home Secretary and be deemed necessary and proportionate in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country. There were 1682 interception warrants approved by the Home Secretary in 2010, latest official figures show.

According to Jonathan Krause, an IT security expert who previously worked for Scotland Yard's hi-tech crime unit, bugging computers is becoming an increasingly important methodology for UK law enforcement. “There are trojans that will be customer written to get past usual security, firewalls, malware scanning and anti-virus devices, but these sorts of things will only be aimed at serious criminals,” he says.

Concerns remain, however, that despite export control regulations, western companies have been supplying high-tech surveillance software to countries where there is little – or no – legislation governing its use. In 2009, for instance, it was discovered that American developer SS8 had supplied the United Arab Emirates with smartphone spyware, after around 100,000 users were sent a bogus software update by telecommunications company Etisalat. The technology – if left undetected – would have enabled authorities to bypass Blackberry email encryption by mining communications from devices before they were sent.

Computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum is well aware what it is like to be a target of covert surveillance. He is a core member of the Tor Project, which develops free internet anonymysing software used by activists and government dissidents across the Middle East and north Africa to evade government monitoring. A former spokesman for WikiLeaks, Appelbaum has had his own personal emails scrutinised by the US government as part of an ongoing grand jury investigation into the whisteblower organisation. On 13 October he was in attendance at ISS World where he was hoping to arrange a presentation about Tor – only to be ejected after one of the surveillance companies complained about his presence.

“There’s something to be said about how these guys are not interested in regulating themselves and they’re interested in keeping people in the dark about what they’re doing,” he says. “These people are not unlike mercenaries. The companies don’t care about anything, except what the law says. In this case, if the law’s ambiguous, they’ll do whatever the law doesn’t explicitly deny. It’s all about money for them, and they don’t care.

“This tactical exploitation stuff, where they’re breaking into people’s computers, bugging them… they make these arguments that it’s good, that it saves lives. But we have examples that show this is not true. I was just in Tunisia a couple of days ago and I met people who told me that posting on Facebook resulted in death squads showing up in your house."

The growth in the use of these methods across the world, Appelbaum believes, means governments now have a vested interest in keeping computer users' security open to vulnerabilities. "Intelligence [agencies] want to keep computers weak as it makes it easier to surveil you," he says, adding that an increase in demand for such technology among law enforcement agencies is of equal concern.

“I don’t actually think breaking into the computer of a terrorist is the world’s worst idea – it might in fact be the only option – but these guys [surveillance technology companies] are trying to sell to any police officer," he says. "I mean, what business does the Baltimore local police have doing tactical exploitation into people’s computers? They have no business doing that. They could just go to the house, serve a warrant, and take the computer. This is a kind of state terror that is simply unacceptable in my opinion.”

Jerry Lucas, the president of the company behind ISS World, TeleStrategies, does not deny surveillance developers that attend his conference supply to repressive regimes. In fact, he is adamant that the manufacturers of surveillance technology, like Gamma International, SS8 and Hacking Team, should be allowed to sell to whoever they want.

“The surveillance that we display in our conferences, and discuss how to use, is available to any country in the world,” he says. “Do some countries use this technology to suppress political statements? Yes, I would say that’s probably fair to say. But who are the vendors to say that the technology is being not being used for good as well as for what you would consider not so good.”

Would he be comfortable in the knowledge that regimes in Zimbabwe and North Korea were purchasing this technology from western companies? “That’s just not my job to determine who’s a bad country and who’s a good country. That’s not our business, we’re not politicians … we’re a for profit company. Our business is bringing governments together who want to buy this technology.”

TeleStrategies organises a number of conferences around the world, including in Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. Every country has a need for the latest covert IT intrusion technology, according to Lucas, because modern criminal investigations cannot be conducted without it. He claims “99.9 per cent good comes from the industry” and accuses the media of not covering surveillance-related issues objectively.

“I mean, you can sell cars to Libyan rebels, and those cars and trucks are used as weapons. So should General Motors and Nissan wonder, ‘how is this truck going to be used?’ Why don’t you go after the auto makers?” he says. “It’s an open market. You cannot stop the flow of surveillance equipment.”

This article first appeared at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/01/governments-hacking-techniques-surveillance