Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Viscount Brookeborough and Baroness Harding of Winscombe

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

[Viscount Brookeborough (CB)]

My Lords, I hesitate to enter the debate on the Bill at this stage because I have not been involved until now, but as I listened, I compared this in my mind with what occurred in Northern Ireland over 40 years of terrorism. I cannot support this amendment for the very reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile.

During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when nothing was on the internet because it did not exist, every bit of information was in hard copy or personal contact. We in the security forces had the right to look at every single bit of information on a person, in their car or indeed in their home if we entered it for a specific reason. That information was held for a very long time. It is amazing how much of it, how many little bits of information, one day tied up with something else and became of extreme interest. Noble Lords who are aware of what happened in Northern Ireland, especially the noble Lord, Lord King, will support the fact that in many cases people’s lives—including in part, I have to say, my own—were protected by snippets of information that at the time were of no particular value and were simply filed away, because they led to associations between people or to intelligence that people were passing to each other. Anyone who has been near to a bomb in Northern Ireland will understand that it is worth while attempting to save people’s lives by the best method.

I have followed the Bill from the point of view of the restrictions on holding information. I do not support the tightness of that; our problems went on for 40 years but the problems that this country is facing at the moment are relatively short-lived. We must create the right security environment by allowing people to get information, which is no longer held in hard copy, on cigarette packets or bits of paper in their homes but is now on the internet. People involved in terrorism or civil crime, including paedophilia, are going to areas either that we cannot get to or where we are wilfully restricting our access to what amounts to very important intelligence.

I apologise again for entering proceedings at this stage, but I could not support such an amendment that would yet again restrict our Security Service and police from gaining and keeping intelligence that one day might be vital to any one of your Lordships. I know these matters seem a long way away when they are outside, in different cities or different parts of the country. If noble Lords lived in Northern Ireland, they would understand how important it is that some sort of connection is kept with leads about what is going on. That information is not in hard copy but up there in the cloud, and while we stay down here we are not going to get it.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose the amendment, purely from a position of practicality. I have an interest as chief executive of TalkTalk, one of the communications service providers. If we are to legislate to create a tool to be used, it needs to be effective. My business involves consuming large amounts of data and trying to analyse them, and you cannot do that without a filter. There are other elements of the Bill on which we can debate whether we have the appropriate legal checks and balances, and I defer to the many noble and learned Lords in this House who are debating them, but surely it cannot make sense to withdraw completely the tool that would make those checks and balances effective.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe]

My Lords, I rise to speak against this amendment. As the chief executive of a telecoms company, I clearly cannot profess a lack of understanding of the technology. I am a little confused by noble Lords’ concern that internet connection records can be got round and are not perfect because telephony is exactly the same. If I make a telephone call and am really smart, I know how to make sure that you do not know what number or where in the world I am calling from. Without needing to be that smart, I can buy a temporary SIM card and throw the phone away as soon as I have made the call. Organised crime and nation states have been able to use plenty of ways to obfuscate the existing ability for us to track telephony. That does not mean we think it a bad idea to be able to track people’s telephone calls.

I argue that exactly the same is true of internet connection records and their use by law enforcement agencies. It would not be perfect; no piece of technology ever is. It needs very careful scrutiny, which the Bill has had in both Houses. But I want to live in not just a civilised physical world but a civilised digital world, and when all our law enforcement agencies say that their ability to hunt down criminals is seriously hampered by the world moving to the digital space, we should take that very seriously and make sure that we arm them with the best possible tools. I believe that access to internet connection records is practically possible and desirable to create a civilised digital world.

[Viscount Brookeborough]

Briefly, this brings up the principle of what society is prepared to sacrifice—in this case, a little privacy—to get what it needs to fight criminals and terrorism. I am sorry to go back to Northern Ireland but everybody was stopped daily and their lives were infringed on the whole time there. But they were happy enough because the fight, which was against terrorism in our case, was succeeding. By the end, 95% of all incidents planned by the IRA never took place because of intelligence activity. We know that it is intrusive to do this but if we had stopped stopping cars, when 99.9% of those cars held the innocent and the unassociated, it would have enabled those we were up against to operate freely across everything. The very fact that people were prepared to sacrifice some of their freedom meant that it was more difficult for those who wanted to kill, maim and commit crimes. If we do not push them out of normal day-to-day activity into the more complicated part, we will never succeed in fighting them.