Security Services: Supervision

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on securing this debate. I deeply wish that it were not necessary, but in my view, the legal basis under which the security services operate—RIPA—is no longer fit for purpose. I say that as the Peer who had the privilege to chair the Joint Select Committee on the Draft Communications Bill last year, the so-called “Snoopers’ Charter”. We considered the rapidly changing technology, and no area is changing faster than this. I refer the Minister to our conclusion in paragraph 289, where we recommend the super-affirmative procedure.

I pay tribute to all my colleagues in both Houses who have not been properly and publicly thanked for the excellent job they did on that Joint Select Committee. We made a pretty good job. We decimated the draft Bill and came up instead with workable solutions which were unanimously agreed by the whole committee, even though many of us had very different views on the balance between security and privacy. The conclusions we came to in our report were as follows:

“It is the duty of government—any government—to maintain the safety and security of law-abiding citizens, so that they may go about their lives and their business as far as possible in freedom from fear. This is not only in the public interest; it is in the interest of law-abiding members of the public. For this the law enforcement authorities must be given the tools they need. Reasonable access to some communications data is undoubtedly one of those tools. But the Government also have a duty to respect the right of citizens to privacy, and their ability to go about their lawful activities, including their communications, without avoidable intrusions on their privacy”.

We went on to say:

“Our overall conclusion is that there is a case for legislation which will provide the law enforcement authorities with some further access to communications data, but that the current draft Bill is too sweeping, and goes further than it need or should”.

Those were the conclusions we came to last year in the light of what we knew then. Although Prism and Tempora were at the centre of what we were being asked to look at, we were deliberately kept in the dark about them. It is my personal view that the draft Bill was clearly an attempt to legitimise what the security services were doing already. Of course, they may be talking publicly about it, but they refuse to come to Parliament to tell us about the Bill they were demanding that we pass. This situation cannot be allowed to continue. We need a wide-ranging debate about the balance that we described in our conclusions. We said that they should have reasonable access to some communications, not uncontrolled access to anything they liked or beyond what Parliament intended. This is the key point: whether the security services were technically operating under some part of RIPA is irrelevant. What is wrong, as we have discovered over the past few months, is that they were doing things way beyond the imagination of Parliament and which we did not know about. I have no brief for the Guardian and its general, Polly Toynbee, bleating for someone else’s money to be spent on its favourite causes, but in my opinion the newspaper has done a service by revealing the reach and the extent of what was being done in our name.

I detest traitors who reveal secrets which endanger national security, but there is a greater threat to our freedom when powerful agencies of the state feel that Parliament must be kept in the dark about the parameters under which they operate. I say “parameters” because we do not need to know, nor should we know, the operational techniques and methodology of the security services, but we should have known that they had the Prism and Tempora capability and were using it under rules agreed by Parliament.

In the early 1980s, I sat in a trench in Germany and asked my commanding officer, “What is my mission, Sir?”. “Your mission, Maclean”, he said, “like the rest of us, is to try to hold them back for 48 hours to give the politicians time to nuke ‘em”. In those days, breaching national security could have resulted in the complete nuclear annihilation and destruction of the western world, and that was what traitors like Burgess, Philby and the other Maclean were doing. It is preposterous for senior figures now to suggest that Snowden is in the same league as those traitors. He is not, and that should be obvious. There is also a need for a debate about what is national security now. Clearly a dirty nuclear bomb in central London which renders the capital unusable and uninhabitable for 50 years is a mega threat to national security. However— and I choose my words very carefully so that I am not misunderstood—much as a terrorist bomb that kills 100 people is an abominable evil and we should try to stop it, is it a threat to national security in the same way as nuclear annihilation in the 1980s? Is it a threat that requires the communications of 56 million law-abiding people to be collected in case there is an evil terrorist among them? I do not know, but I do know that this Parliament—your Lordships’ House and the other place—must debate it and collectively strike the balance between reasonable access on the one hand and privacy on the other. We must have replacement legislation for RIPA along the lines recommended by my committee, with proper checks and balances on the security services. We need that debate, it must be wide-ranging, and we need it soon.