"National Security and the Law" was the subject of this year's Birkenhead Lecture. It contains a description and assessment of the current state of our law on counter-terrorism, hostile state activity and surveillance - and on the vital court and oversight mechanisms that apply to it. The lecture was delivered at Gray's Inn on [...]
I gave a lecture last night at Clifford Chance in London on "Taming the Wild West: Government and the Internet". It touches on a number of currently contested areas of law and policy ranging from state surveillance and "surveillance capitalism" to online harms, antitrust and the corporation as courthouse. If the lecture were a website, [...]
I was invited to The Hague last month to deliver the Hague Lecture on International Law, to an invited audience of diplomats, international judges and others at the British Embassy. No expert on public international law, I concentrated instead on the threat of terrorism - real and perceived - and the role played by the courts of [...]
I spoke on this subject to the Human Rights Law Association on 25 October, at a meeting held to consider the effect of the 13 September 2018 Big Brother Watch judgment of the first section of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. My slides, which focussed on the utility and lawfulness of bulk investigatory powers (sometimes referred [...]
This is not a blog post as such, but a compilation. I thought it might be useful to link to what I have had to say in the past several years on counter-terrorism, surveillance and countering extremism. Counter-Terrorism In this field, my successor Max Hill QC now holds the reins as Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation (@terrorwatchdog). His first reports were published [...]
I lectured to the Hart Judicial Review conference in December on recent developments in the case law concerning terrorism, surveillance and extremism. My handout is here and the accompanying PowerPoint presentation is here.
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 became law on 29 November, when it received Royal Assent. It is currently being brought into force in stages. This post, originally composed on 3 December 2016, is my big-picture reaction to the Act, which was influenced by my reports A Question of Trust (June 2015) and Report of Bulk Powers Review (August [...]
The report of my Bulk Powers Review, which I delivered to the Prime Minister on 7 August, was published to Parliament (in unaltered form, and without redactions or confidential annex) at 11 am today. Web and print versions of the report are on the gov.uk website, and a PDF copy of the report is here: Bulk Powers Review – final [...]
