Investigatory Powers Bill (First sitting)
(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)
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Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
Thank you, Ms Dorries. May I make a declaration of interest in relation to this witness and a number of other witnesses generally? I know this witness and some others; I have worked with them both as a lawyer and as Director of Public Prosecutions. I therefore put that on the record—if I may make a general declaration, it applies to Mr Anderson and quite a number of the witnesses today.
The Solicitor General (Robert Buckland)
Ditto. I know many of the witnesses as well.
Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)
David Anderson was my pupil master when I was a barrister.
Joanna Cherry
Q Do you agree that in the investigation of threats to national security and terrorism there can really be no justification for scooping up personal data in relation to children?
David Anderson: I am going to duck that one because bulk personal datasets were outside my remit. The use of bulk personal datasets, we now know, has been subject to annual review by the Intelligence Services Commissioner for several years. Perhaps he is the appropriate person to ask about that.
The Minister for Security (Mr John Hayes)
Q Thank you for coming, David. On bulk personal datasets, I note that you say that the members of the intelligence community that you have met, and what you have seen and heard from them, have confirmed the view that was expressed by the ISC and others. Are you clear about their efficacy and utility?
David Anderson: I think what I said was that bulk personal datasets had been looked at by the Intelligence and Security Committee and by the Intelligence Services Commissioner. I have read what they have said about that, including in closed hearings, and I said that what I was shown by the agencies was consistent with that, but I was not trying to do the same exercise that they had done of deciding whether these things were necessary or proportionate.
Mr Hayes
Q As a follow up on that, obviously you appreciate that your recommendations on the operational case being made have been built in to what we are doing. Further to what you said about the Chairman of the ISC’s recognition of their proportionality and necessity, I suppose you would accept that any publication of that operational case will obviously be limited, because it is an operational case and as soon as you make it public to the point where it ceases to have value, it could compromise operations.
David Anderson: Yes, the agencies’ ability to protect us relies quite heavily on people not knowing exactly what it is they can and cannot do.
Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)
Q I will ask just a couple of questions, if I may, Mr Anderson. Looking at the operational case for bulk powers, the Home Office has stated:
“There is clear evidence that these capabilities have…played a significant part in every major counter terrorism investigation of the last decade, including in each of the seven terrorist attack plots disrupted since November 2014...enabled over 90% of the UK’s targeted military operations during the campaign in the south of Afghanistan…been essential to identifying 95% of the cyber-attacks on people and businesses in the UK discovered by the security and intelligence agencies over the last six months”.
They have also been of great use in serious organised crime and paedophilia investigations, as we know. Are those factors that you and others have taken into account when assessing whether we need bulk powers, and how critical they are to national security and serious organised crime investigations?
David Anderson: I saw and heard enough to persuade myself of the necessity of bulk interception powers and bulk data retention of the type we were describing—phone logs and emails and so on. I did not look at equipment interference, for example, because that was outside my remit, and the query that I raised on that earlier was really the same query that the Intelligence and Security Committee has raised. If you define the targeted powers so broadly as to encompass almost anything, what is the additional utility of a bulk power? I am not persuaded on that simply because I did not do the exercise.
Mr Hayes
Q On Second Reading, Mr Starmer said that you do not know that someone is a suspect until they are a suspect and that at that point you need to know who they are speaking to. The filtering process that you described in your earlier remarks is about taking very large amounts of data and, through that filter, in the end dealing with very small amounts. We have heard a lot of concerns and paranoia about bulk powers. Would it be fair to say that that filtering process is as much about excluding people as it is about including them?
Lord Evans: It is essentially about that. The purpose of the whole machinery is to put the surveillance on people who are actually a direct threat to our national security. You do not want anybody else in the system. You need to get everybody else out of the way as early as possible; otherwise you will get distracted by things that are a waste of resources. That puts you in a very vulnerable position, of course, because something will go wrong. Yes, you are quite right that we are trying to clear away all the things that are not relevant so that you can focus down on to what is relevant.
Mr Hayes
Q Another of Mr Starmer’s arguments was on equipment interference. Does equipment interference become more important as, for example, encryption makes other means by which you would get to the same destination more difficult?
Lord Evans: I am not a siginter so I would find that slightly difficult to know. The fact that we have a multiplicity of devices that any individual will be operating on at any one time means that selecting out those that are really significant becomes a more and more important process. That is certainly the case and I suspect that is part of that bulk process. Because these are overseas powers, this is fundamentally a sigint issue. Therefore I do not feel fully able to answer your question.