The wheels are coming off the online monitoring bandwagon

Item one: A letter tomorrow in The Guardian from 15 Liberal Democrat MPs, led by Julian Huppert, setting out their opposition to illiberal monitoring plans.

Item two: More Conservative MPs joining with David Davis in speaking out against widespread online monitoring, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Item three: The Times reporting, Cameron forced to retreat on snooping powers [£].

Item four: a subtle, but significant, choice of words by Nick Clegg in a media interview this lunchtime presaging a major change of course from the story given to the Sunday Times at the weekend. Clegg signalled (as does The Times report) that the Queen’s Speech will not include a Bill to go through  Parliament on monitoring. Instead: “We’ll make sure that our proposals are published in draft, people can look at them, people can debate them … This will be an open, consultative and properly scrutinised process”.

Exactly what will happen instead is still up for – very lively – debate in government. It may be a plan for some sort of committee investigation into the issue, perhaps a Joint Committee of the two Houses. It may be a draft set of options to go through a complete pre-legislative scrutiny process. It may be a more open-ended consultation. Crucially, Clegg and – pushed by Lib Dem opposition – Cameron have agreed that even the basic case for legislation to extend monitoring has not yet been made.

In other words, the wheels are coming off the bandwagon that parts of the Home Office and the security services were hoping would see sweeping new monitoring powers introduced. It hasn’t ground to a halt or been reversed but it is headed that way.

That is grounds for optimism rather than celebration or complacency, especially given the level of anger in the party and Theresa May’s dreadful article today (written in terms that could just as well justify the government monitoring the route taken by every pedestrian, as my little edit of her piece shows).

A key question for campaigners will be whether it is best to aim for the simplicity of “no Bill, full stop” or to push for legislation which may see the scope of monitoring expanded in some respects but also offers up much better safeguards than the current lax ones.

It is worth remembering just how flawed the current, RIPA based, controls are. In the last full year for which there is data there were 552,550 requests for traffic data made, a figure growing at around 5% per year. Accessing the traffic data for people is not a rare occurrence in the case of serious crime; it is widespread. Those access are not tightly controlled; they are lightly controlled without external judicial authority and even in some cases without any written record being required.

What is more, courtesy of the revelations from the phone hacking scandals, we now know that abuses of the system were not rare. Rather, they were regular and extensive, with some journalists regularly seeking and receiving information that is meant to be private and tightly regulated.

Even worse, if you read the last report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner – the regulator for this area – it paints such a glowing picture of the situation, it makes Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss seem a grumpy pessimist. Evidence from the media’s misdeed makes that picture not just optimistic, it makes it badly wrong.

The opportunity to fix that is the silver lining to all this: now the issue is on the agenda, the opportunity is there not merely to hold the line at the system that Labour left us with (as if that was a good one) but instead to make it a liberal one.

UPDATE: There’s more in Nick Clegg’s interview with The Guardian tonight:

Clegg announced that open parliamentary hearings would be held to examine draft clauses of a new bill.

The deputy prime minister, who said he has had to act as a restraining influence on the security services, made the announcement as he pledged to ensure the coalition did not repeat the mistakes of the last government. “I saw the appalling populist excesses of authoritarian home secretaries, like John Reid, under Labour. This total casual disregard for people who care about privacy and civil liberties – I am not going to allow this government to make the same mistake,” Clegg said in a Guardian interview…

In a rare insight into the tensions between ministers and the security services, Clegg said: “The security establishment will always say they need new powers tomorrow. It is the role of the politicians and parliament to make sure that requests for new powers, updated powers, made by the security services, are properly scrutinised and checked. That is the checks and balances in a democracy.

“In a rough and ready way, they are being played out semi-publicly now. You always have this push and pull. Under the last government, not only did they give everything the police and security services ever asked for, they gave them more than they needed.