Cryp­tome car­ries an email appar­ently sent to BBC staff over report­ing of coun­cils and their use of the Reg­u­la­tion of Invest­ig­at­ory Powers Act:

The ECU [Edit­or­ial Com­plaints Unit] is uphold­ing a com­plaint against BBC News for describ­ing the above Act as a piece of “anti-terrorism legis­la­tion” which was passed “in 2000 as the threat of global ter­ror­ism was on the rise”. Please refrain from using these phrases in future cov­er­age of the Act as the first is wrong, the second is misleading.

The pur­pose of the act was to give legal struc­ture to sur­veil­lance fol­low­ing the intro­duc­tion of the Human Rights Act. The sur­veil­lance was aimed at ser­i­ous crim­in­als and, though ter­ror­ists would fall into
the cat­egory, it is wrong to describe this as anti-terror legislation.

Equally RIPA was passed at a time when Brit­ish law enforce­ment agen­cies were more con­cerned with poten­tial threats from dis­sid­ent IRA fol­low­ers than a more global threat so it is mis­lead­ing to imply that
global ter­ror was a sig­ni­fic­ant factor in prompt­ing the legislation.

Should you need to describe the pur­pose of the Act in brief terms it would be bet­ter to say it “cov­ers all sorts of ser­i­ous crime”.

More detail from A&R [Ana­lysis & Research]

To con­firm, the Act is not a piece of anti-terror legis­la­tion rather it more wide ran­ging, cre­at­ing powers to mon­itor crim­in­als. Accord­ing to the Home Office web­site: “The Reg­u­la­tion of Invest­ig­at­ory Powers
Act (RIPA) legis­lates for using meth­ods of sur­veil­lance and inform­a­tion gath­er­ing to help the pre­ven­tion of crime, includ­ing terrorism.”

The Home Office goes on to say RIPA makes pro­vi­sion for:
* the inter­cep­tion of com­mu­nic­a­tions
* the acquis­i­tion and dis­clos­ure of data relat­ing to com­mu­nic­a­tions
* the car­ry­ing out of sur­veil­lance
* the use of cov­ert human intel­li­gence sources
* access to elec­tronic data pro­tec­ted by encryp­tion or pass­words
* the appoint­ment of Com­mis­sion­ers and the estab­lish­ment of a
tribunal with jur­is­dic­tion to over­see these issues

[Source Home Office: http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/ripa/about-ripa/]