Journalists’ sources must be protected from the authorities, the Society of Editors (SoE) has said, after Theresa May announced a host of proposals that would allow access to reporters’ communications data without prior judicial approval.
While the provisions of the draft investigatory powers bill would normally require authorisation for such access to come from both the home secretary and a judicial commissioner, they would also give May the power to sign off urgent requests alone – only submitting the decision to review in retrospect.
The SoE, which has campaigned to protect the rights of journalists against creeping state control, believes sources need to be shielded from such powers.
“The police need to understand that journalists are not criminals and that they need to think very carefully before they do anything to search their records,” said Bob Satchwell, the executive director of SoE.
“Accessing journalists’ call records should be a rare exception for police rather than the rule it seems to have become in recent years.”
According to May, the draft bill is necessary to ensure there is “no area of cyberspace which is a haven for those who seek to harm us to plot, poison minds and peddle hatred under the radar”.
If it eventually becomes law, the bill would define “sensitive professions” that handle important information, such as that carried out by doctors, lawyers, MPs and journalists. Many journalists rely on aconfidentiality agreement when trying to convince vulnerable people to speak out in the public interest. The draft bill would create the legal framework by which the security services could violate that confidentiality.
May said a “double-lock” system, under which the secretary of state and a judicial commissioner – usually a former judge – would need to agree to issue a warrant, would provide protection. But she clarified that in urgent cases the system would change.
“There will be an urgent process, so it will be possible for a secretary of state to sign an urgent warrant for it to come immediately into effect, and then there will be a period of time within which the judge will have to review that and then make a decision as to whether it should continue or not,” she said.
No warning would be given to a journalist, making it impossible to contest the decision. “There also needs to be a clear rule that media organisations get fair warning so that they can challenge any requests if required,” Satchwell said in response.
He added that the new proposals did not represent an improvement on the interim measures put in place after it emerged the Metropolitan police had obtained the phone records of the Sun journalist Tom Newton Dunn while trying to identify a source in the Plebgate case. The provisions were criticised by the media industry.
