Government Communications Headquarters

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, lawyers have come in at a very early stage in this. I was briefed by FCO lawyers as well as by FCO officials this morning. Oversight is a continuing process, so any unusual change in pattern would naturally feed up towards the scrutiny and accountability process.

[Lord Strasburger]

My Lords, I apologise for arriving during the reading of this Statement but, in my defence, I was late because I was listening to it from the horse’s mouth, from the Foreign Secretary in another place.

In the USA, it would seem that politicians have been asleep at the wheel while their security and intelligence services have helped themselves to anyone’s private data without any meaningful oversight. Happily, in this county we have much better checks and balances on our security services, and the Government to their credit have been much more robust in resisting calls for security at any cost from the proponents of the disproportionate and unnecessary communications data Bill, which was accurately given the soubriquet the “snoopers’ charter”.

My question has been asked already today, but I ask my noble friend to try to address it. On the 197 occasions in the past year when GCHQ has stated that it obtained data from the Prism system in the States, was the data acquisition authorised by a Minister on each occasion? That is not about the content or the cases involved but simply about the process and legality.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that is one of the issues which will be investigated by the ISC. The noble Lord and I may differ on what we think about the history and current role of the US agencies, but there is quite a large issue about US companies—Google and others—which we have assumed to be extremely benevolent but which are collecting a great deal of personal information on a very large number of people. That raises long-term issues which we will, no doubt, have to debate in future Sessions along with both domestic and international regulations to cope with them.