When the Regulation of Investigatory Powers legislation was introduced, tinfoil hat wearers like me wrote a lot of words about how the rules would be abused. And lo! It turns out that councils are using the anti-terror legislation to find the owners of crapping dogs.
Earlier this month, it emerged that a family in Poole in Dorset had been covertly tracked for nearly three weeks to check if they lived in a school catchment area.
The investigation has also revealed that the law was used in at least seven cases to find out about people who let their dogs foul; a breach of planning law; an animal-welfare case; and an instance of littering
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We had a girl in here doing work experience a couple of months back. (She was dead nice and we were all somewhat intimidated by how utterly on top of her life she seemed to be at a mere seventeen years of age. She’s probably going to be president of something or other.) Anyway, she mentioned at one point how her dad tended to do background searches on her boyfriends — “But no, it’s all right, he’s a police officer, so he’s allowed to do it.” I think that accurately summed up how the police and other state functionaries think: they see no difference between being allowed to have access to the systems and being allowed to use them for whatever the hell they like.