Independent [UK]

01/15/06

Tony Blair is preparing to scrap a 40-year ban on tapping MPs' telephones, despite fierce Cabinet opposition . ... He is expected to formally announce to the Commons within weeks that MPs can no longer be sure that the security services and others will not intercept their communications. Until now, successive administrations have pledged that there should be no tapping 'whatsoever' of MPs' phones, and that they would be told if it was necessary to breach the ban. But that convention -- known as the Wilson Doctrine, after Harold Wilson, the prime minister who introduced it -- is to be abandoned in an expansion of MI5 powers following the London bombings...

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article338691.ece


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp