Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Lord Strasburger and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard - part one): House of Lords
Monday 17th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (LD)]

My Lords, I regret that I cannot support my noble friends’ attempts to remove these clauses from the Bill. I say with great respect to them that it is a misconceived attempt and displays a misunderstanding of what the authorities do, have done and can do. In my judgment, for what it is worth, the removal of these clauses would reduce the capacity of the authorities legitimately to interdict what could be extremely serious crime and catch those guilty of it.

We have heard terms such as “limitless”, “monster” and “unfettered”. At the risk of repeating what has been said earlier on Report, it is grossly exaggerated to suggest that unfettered, monstrous or limitless power is being given to the authorities. There can never have been a Bill on subjects such as these that has had so many fetters on the authorities and that has placed so many limits on what they can do. Indeed, if it has created a monster at all, it is a monster of regulation, not of unregulated activity.

I saw a briefing on these amendments earlier today. They are founded on the proposition that the authorities—the police and the security services—have the time to go on fishing expeditions. If that is what is being said, I can think of at least two kinds of fishing expedition. One is the sort of fishing expedition where you stick a worm on the end of a line and dangle it into water not believing that there is anything in there, and the other involves casting a sprat to catch a mackerel. If there is a fishing expedition here, it is the kind in which the authorities would know that there is very likely to be a mackerel beneath the water into which they cast their well-fattened sprat.

These amendments would inhibit current practice in the courts and in investigations. I can think of two murder cases in which I appeared as leading counsel—one as a prosecutor, the other as a defender—in which a conviction resulted from exactly the kind of activity being permitted in the Bill. In each case, it is certainly possible—I do not want to exaggerate—that there would have been no conviction if not for the availability of this kind of activity. At the time of each of those cases, the activity was nothing like as well-controlled or scrutinised as is proposed in the Bill. The sort of activity that I am describing can and has been used to catch murderers, paedophiles and money launderers as well as terrorists. It is a necessary tool of a responsible state.

The issue is whether the Bill allows this information to be obtained in a responsible way by the state. I believe the Government have gone a very long way to ensure that everybody can be confident that in future such material will be obtained by a responsible state and that these clauses are a necessary part of that activity.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 100C, 100D and 100E which have been very ably explained by my noble friend Lord Paddick.

When vague and non-specific legislation comes before us, it is perhaps because its authors are unable to be more precise because they have not thought it through or because they choose to not share the details with us. Whichever reason applies in the case of the request filter, there is no doubt that Clauses 64, 65 and 66 are notable more for what they do not say than for what they do. Despite the best efforts of both the Joint Committees on which I had the privilege of sitting—the one on this Bill and the one that examined the draft Communications Data Bill in 2012, in which the request filter first appeared—we are none the wiser about the request filter architecture, how it will work, who will develop it and who will operate it.

We have only to look at an obscure section in an elderly piece of legislation—the Telecommunications Act 1984—to see how overbroad drafting can lead to unintended consequences. Years ago, Section 94 of that Act was used by the Home Office secretly to create a brand new, highly intrusive power—namely, bulk acquisition of communications data—which the Government, to their credit, are now bringing in from the cold in this Bill. For a long time, however, the existence and use of this power carried on without the approval, or even the knowledge, of Parliament. Quite by chance, just a few hours ago, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that this very powerful secret power of bulk acquisition of communications data, which was created out of that vague section in the Telecommunications Act 1984, has been used illegally by the intelligence and security services for 10 years. We must guard against carelessly passing clauses so vague as to be open to misuse.

Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Lord Strasburger and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Monday 11th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 14. We have already heard at length that, in its report on the Bill, the ISC called for a “backbone” of privacy to be inserted into it. The Home Office’s initial response was to add one word to the next version of the Bill: it inserted “privacy” into the title of Part 1 so that “General protections” became “General privacy protections”—nothing else changed. Later, under some pressure in the Commons, Clause 2 came into being, which goes some way, but not all the way, to inserting the privacy protections that we on this side of the Committee feel are needed.

This episode suggests to me that no one in the Government has a brief to speak up for privacy and civil liberties when legislation is being formulated. Presumably, that is why the Home Secretary included Section 46 in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, giving her the power to establish the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board. The only problem is that she has not commenced this power and the vacuum in privacy protection advocacy in government is still there.

Amendment 14 would force the Home Secretary’s hand so that she must get on with it—actually, to be more precise, her successor must get on with it because she probably has bigger fish to fry as of Wednesday. For now, this is simply a probing amendment. If it were brought back on Report, it would probably need some improvement in terms of the board’s scope and powers. The American version of this, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has been very successful with a much wider brief. For now, I will be content to hear the Government’s response to the amendment as it stands.

Before I sit down, I will say a couple of words regarding the friendly fire that has been coming from behind me during this debate—rather ungraciously, I might say—from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. He queried whether I had read Nineteen Eighty-Four and knew about its description of CCTV in every bedroom. I have, actually, but I suspect that he has not been doing his reading on security matters because, if he had, he would know about Project Optic Nerve, in which GCHQ intercepted 1 million Yahoo! users’ webcams, which effectively put state cameras into 1 million bedrooms.

[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.