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Spying? Stalking? I think not.
This story was on 5 Live yesterday evening. According to the media, Poole Borough Council used "laws to track criminals and terrorists" (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) to determine whether they were lying about living in a school catchment area.
So what powers were these? Phone tapping? CCTV cameras pointed at the house 24/7? SWAT teams on standby?
No. They sent a man to check if the family left the house they claimed they lived at each morning and returned there in the afternoon. The BBC did their best to sensationalise this as "spying" - despite listeners texting in telling them to stop trying to 'sex up' their stories. Others went one better, using attention grabbing headlines claiming that 'spies stalked' the family. If this is spying, the government have been 'spying' on suspected benefit cheats for years now. Why is this any different?
Follow up:
Poole Borough Council should be commended for taking action on the issue of people committing fraud to get their kids into a particular school, because for every kid that gets in this way, a child with a legitimate entitlement to a place has to lose out. The council said they'd used the powers twice previously in the past year and on both occasions had found that the parents had lied about where they lived, though in this case the rules were only bent rather than broken so the child's place at the school was not rescinded.
Oh yeah and Liberty are up in arms, describing the investigation as "ridiculous". This is a silly position for Liberty to take and undermines their legitimate concerns over schemes like national DNA databases and ID cards. The (anonymous) mother's "Won't someone think of the children?" response is also pathetic, if predictable.