A man has been convicted under UK anti-terror laws for not handing over his PIN and password to border police. Does this now mean we all have to give up our login details when asked?
The case concerns Muhammad Rabbani, director of the advocacy group , which campaigns against the impact of counter-terrorism policies. On 20 November last year he was stopped by border police when entering the UK at Heathrow airport in London. Having refused to reveal the PIN to his iPhone and the password to his computer, he was arrested.
Yesterday, he was under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 as a result.
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Rabbani told the court that he did not want to give police access to his devices because he was returning from a wedding in Doha, Qatar, where he had received confidential documents. They were from a man alleging that he had been tortured over the course of a decade by a US government agency.
In her judgement, senior district judge Emma Arbuthnot acknowledged that “the importance of passwords and PIN numbers in the 21st century cannot be overstated” – but she found that Rabbani had committed an offence nonetheless and handed down a lenient sentence. Rabbani was ordered to pay £620 in costs and was given a conditional discharge, meaning that if he commits no other crimes within the next 12 months he will not face further penalties.
“If privacy and confidentiality are crimes, then the law stands condemned,” said Rabbani after leaving court. He added that he and his team would appeal the decision.
‘Incompatible’ law
Schedule 7 gives police special powers, specifically at ports, to stop and search individuals without requiring a suspicion of wrongdoing. It has created headlines before, notably in 2013 when David Miranda was . Miranda is the partner of investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped publish US surveillance agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
Following an appeal in the Miranda case, British judges Schedule 7 was “incompatible” with the European Convention on Human Rights when it came to – specifically – journalists’ protection of their sources.
Rabbani is not a journalist, so that ruling does not apply, but one human rights lawyer, Shoaib Khan, who sits on the executive committee of the UK Human Rights Lawyers Association, is calling for Schedule 7 to be repealed, saying there should be exceptions for cases like this.
“The actions that Mr Rabbani was convicted of had nothing to do with terrorism in any way yet he has been convicted of an offence under the Terrorism Act,” he says.
“His sentence – a conditional discharge – clearly shows that the court did not consider it to be an offence that was serious in any way.”
Unlike more recent UK legislation on digital surveillance, there is no provision for judicial oversight of the police’s Schedule 7 powers, says at the University of Essex, UK. The police, in effect, can ask for sensitive information on an individual’s devices at the border as often as they like. There were more than 17,000 stop and searches under Schedule 7 in the 12 months ending this June.
“I’m not suggesting that there should never be access to that type of information, but if there is going to be access it should be at a higher level of scrutiny and oversight,” says Murray.
