Security Services: Supervision

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Soley, for initiating this important debate. Let me start with two tributes. First, I pay tribute to our security services which do an excellent job of keeping us safe. My second tribute goes jointly to the American whistleblower Edward Snowden and to the Guardian, which has published his astonishing revelations. Both have been brave and highly responsible—all but one of the Guardian articles was approved in advance by the Government—and were it not for them, we and the rest of the world would still be in the dark about what the NSA and GCHQ are up to.

This scandal, for that is what it is, is not the fault of GCHQ, which naturally will grab all the tools it can until it is stopped. The blame falls on those in this country and in America who should have been watching over the spies. In the UK, I am talking about the Cabinet in this Government and the previous Government, the National Security Council and the Intelligence and Security Committee. These bodies are supposed to oversee the security services. It is their job to ensure that the British people are not only safe but that their privacy is protected and that intrusions into our private lives are proportionate and justified. In the case of GCHQ’s Project Tempora, they have all failed miserably.

The only way such highly intrusive powers can be granted in a democracy is with the informed consent of the people, via Parliament. Parliament was certainly not informed about Tempora, nor has it given its consent. We parliamentarians knew nothing about the way GCHQ was helping itself to the private data of every citizen until the Guardian exposed it. The Cabinet, the NSC and the ISC have all been asleep at the wheel while GCHQ ran out of control.

The ISC, which has the most intimate access to the security services and should have known what was going on, lacks resources and the skills needed to understand the technologies being used. It has clearly failed to ask the awkward questions it should have been asking. The ISC must be unfit for purpose, even in its recently modified guise, and there are questions about its independence. Parliament should not have had to rely on a whistleblower to reveal Tempora’s massive abuse of power.

Furthermore, the Home Office has deliberately ensured that Parliament is kept in the dark. Last year, I sat on the Select Committee on the draft Communications Data Bill, under the very able chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, and listened to Home Office officials repeatedly justify the Bill by adamantly asserting that there was a 25% shortfall in the communications they could collect and that this gap was hampering the fight against terrorism. At no time did they disclose, not even in the two private sessions, that for years GCHQ has been collecting far more data than that Bill would have given it and that there is no shortfall. That deliberate deception of Parliament is an affront to democracy, and those officials should be seriously considering their positions.

So what needs to happen now? First, there needs to be a vigorous public debate about what we are prepared to allow our security services to do and the boundaries of their reach into our private lives. I hope that the outcome would be permission for intrusive and up-to-date powers of interception for the police and security services where there are convincing grounds for suspicion of serious crime. Equally there needs to be a strong prohibition of mass untargeted surveillance of ordinary, innocent citizens. There will be a need for new legislation to replace RIPA, which was full of deliberate loopholes when it was written and is now hopelessly out of date. There needs to be very strong and sceptical oversight which reports directly to Parliament and has the necessary resources and skills and real teeth. Most of all, we need a sea change in the Government’s approach to the trade-off between liberty and control.

The Snowden cat is out of the bag. He has 58,000 secret documents, and so far the Guardian has published excerpts from just 17 of them. There must be much more to come. It will no longer do for the Government to sit Canute-like on the beach while a tsunami of further revelations engulfs their old policy of sticking their fingers in their ears and muttering that they do not discuss security matters. They must stop trying to shoot the messenger by attacking the Guardian. They must also stop pretending that Britain has the best oversight of its security services in the world when that oversight has spectacularly failed to spot and prevent intrusive surveillance of every citizen without Parliament’s knowledge and consent.

Our Government must now engage in the public debate about what spying the people will or will not tolerate—a debate that has been happening for some time in America, from the President down, and also in France and Germany. The status quo is no longer an option. It is time for the Government to engage fully in the debate.