Investigatory Powers Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (LD)]

My Lords, I am not going to enter into an argument with my noble friend about the activities of GCHQ, particularly when they have been misdescribed so fully, but I will say one or two things about the merits of the amendments before us, particularly Amendment 6.

I agree with what my noble friend Lord Lester of Herne Hill said about this group of amendments, including Amendment 6, for the reasons he gave. It would be helpful if the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, could explain to the Committee the difference between Amendment 6 and the intention of the Government as set out in Clause 2(2)(a). If the intention of the Government is to do what my noble friend Lord Lester described, I respectfully suggest that the adoption of the wording in Amendment 6 would be more useful and more certain and, above all, as my noble friend said, would avoid unnecessary disputes about the meaning of and compliance with Article 8 in the courts.

Unfortunately, I disagree again with my noble friends about Amendment 14. I am not against a Privacy and Civil Liberties Board if the Government wish to create one. Indeed, I would rather support the creation of a board which had an overarching view of privacy and civil liberties. The board that was created in the 2015 Act is most certainly not a Privacy and Civil Liberties Board. It is a board that was intended to have some kind of oversight of interception, surveillance and other matters, and was a construct agreed as a compromise because of the nature of government at that time. I am afraid it is a glass half-full. Therefore, I urge the Government not to adopt that Privacy and Civil Liberties Board.

It is also worth saying that we have come an awfully long way in the protection of the public against unlawful intrusion by the state into their private affairs since the enactment of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board provision, which has not been brought into force. The safeguards included in this Bill as a result of the work of my successor as independent reviewer, David Anderson, and of the Intelligence and Security Committee and the RUSI panel mean that we have a much fuller raft of protections in the Bill. In my view, they are far more beneficial and provide a great deal more than was ever going to be provided by this form of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board. I respectfully suggest to Ministers that this amendment is entirely unnecessary.

However, I emphasise that there are genuine concerns about potential breaches of privacy and civil liberties. They are concerns about what the public sector can do and they should also be concerns about what the private sector already does. Any of us who subscribe to online groceries, books, music or other similar consumer opportunities on the internet, as I confess I do—I frequently stream music in my car from my mobile phone—probably do not realise how much we have allowed our privacy to be trespassed upon by the so-called privacy policies of large internet service providers. If we are to have a Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, let us do the whole job, not just a bit of it.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I will follow up the noble Lord’s point about what the public sign up to in the private sector—of course, the private sector has lobbied against part of the Bill because it has a vested commercial interest. If you sign up to PayPal, you have signed up to 36,275 words of terms and conditions. Who reads them? “Hamlet” is 30,066 words. If you sign up to Apple iTunes, you are signing up to 19,972 words of conditions; longer than “Macbeth” at 18,110 words. It goes on: Facebook’s has 11,195 words. You tick the box—that is all you do—and give these companies access to your information. These companies would never have been able to start in other societies without the rule of law—we all know that. They can only operate in open, democratic societies. You sign away all kinds of things. We know there was a test at one time when someone changed the terms and conditions to an agreement to give away their firstborn and people ticked the boxes, because they did not read them.