Security News > 2021 > March > UK to introduce new laws and a code of practice for police wanting to rifle through mobile phone messages
A new UK law will explicitly authorise the "Voluntary" slurping of data from mobile phones of crime suspects and witnesses.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which was introduced to Parliament this week, contains clauses that will allow police and others to extract data from mobile phones if the user "Voluntarily" hands the device over.
The most pointed criticism came from privacy pressure group Big Brother Watch, which insisted that victims of sexual assault were submitting to "Digital strip searches" as a result of cooperating with police investigators.
Importantly, police are not as strictly bound by these codes of practice as they are by the actual law - the proposals in the new Bill say police must only "Have regard" to the code of practice.
BBW campaigned hard on what it called "Digital strip searches" as part of a questionable response to a Crown Prosecution Service scandal where police and prosecutors had deliberately withheld evidence from courts showing that men accused of rape and sexual assault were likely to be innocent.
"Campaign group Liberty said it hadn't looked specifically at the mobile phone search parts of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill but instead pointed to other troubling parts of it, saying:"It's a primary duty of Government to ensure that our communities are safe and free.