Phantom Parrot review – cautionary tale of state surveillance and the war on privacy

We all know (and are largely complacent) about the limitless possibilities for digital surveillance and data collection by corporations intent on selling us things, or using our existence to sell advertising. Kate Stonehill’s film is about the more old-fashioned subject of state surveillance and specifically the existence of a disquieting new programme in the UK nicknamed “Phantom Parrot”: the practice of remote spying on mobile phone use.

Stonehill’s film is also about schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, which gives the police powers to search people at UK borders, without needing explicit grounds for suspicion on terrorism. That legislation was brought in before the smartphone was invented, but means that officers can demand detainees hand over their PINs and passcodes to all devices on pain of prosecution and a three-month prison sentence. Because, for all that almost all the information exists on external servers and the cloud, there are still some things which are only held on this handset, to which most of us entrust our entire existence.

This was the fate of Muhammad Rabbani, international director of Cage, the group which campaigns for Muslims held under war-on-terror laws, who was held in 2016 on returning from Qatar for refusing to hand over his PIN. So without ever having been convicted of anything, and for having entirely reasonable concerns about privacy and confidentiality as it might affect other people, citizens can find themselves criminalised.

Rabbani was represented by the veteran human-rights lawyer Gareth Peirce (played by Emma Thompson in Jim Sheridan’s 1993 movie In the Name of the Father, about the Guildford Four case). Peirce is shown speaking to various human-rights groups and notes that we have become desensitised to state abuse: “The capacity to be shocked is important.” (True enough, although many still had this capacity in 2015 when Cage’s research director Asim Qureshi publicly called Islamic State killer Mohammed “Jihadi John” Emwazi a “beautiful young man”.) Well, this is another valuable film about the digital war on privacy.

• Phantom Parrot is in UK cinemas from 15 March