Intelligence and Security Services

Lord Brady of Altrincham Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

To accommodate the three Members still seeking to catch my eye, I am reducing the time limit for speeches to six minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Winnick]

On a point of order, Mr Brady. As I understand it, the hon. Gentleman was alleging that I said that MI5 had bugged every reader of the Daily Mirror. I said nothing of the kind. I quoted Edward Heath, who made the remark.

[Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

The hon. Gentleman has corrected the record, which is a point of debate and not of order.

[Dr Lewis]

Further to that point of order, Mr Brady. Is there any way in which we can arrange for bogus points of order to be struck from the record, so that Members will be deterred from making them in future?

[Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

No, they remain on the record to embarrass those who make them.

[Richard Graham]

After that distraction, I am delighted to continue and to hear that the hon. Member for Walsall North does not imagine that our intelligence services are interested in readers of the Daily Mirror per se. The later accusation from the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton was disappointing. My constituents who work for GCHQ are unable to answer back directly. We should take the word of the senior judge that they act within the highest levels of integrity and legal compliance. That is a crucial part of the oversight of the intelligence agencies, which is ultimately the responsibility of our Parliament.

My hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) was wrong to say that threats are diminishing. My intervention on his speech quoted directly from the recent speech of the director-general of MI5. It was quite clear from the statistics that he gave that threats have increased from an average of one or two a year for the past 10 years to four major threats in the first half of this year. On average, 33 terrorists have been convicted every year for the past 10 years, but 24 have been convicted in the first half of this year already.

The truth is that the threats are becoming more complicated and more sophisticated. They come not necessarily from states but from individuals or organisations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Lewis]

I entirely accept that point, which was partly covered by the hon. Member for Cheltenham when he briefly referred to the need to hoover up haystacks to be able to search for the needles in them afterwards. The question is whether we then have access to the irrelevant parts of the haystack, or legally supervised targeted access to those needles in the haystack, which can be detected as a result of modern technology. This is all about the mass collection, mass storage and interrogation of mass data so collected and stored.

I now come back to the third question: who should rightly be regarded as a whistleblower? I would like to reach a point of agreement again with the hon. Member for Cambridge. In his defence of The Guardian newspaper, he said that it is precisely because The Guardian is not simply publishing everything that has fallen into its hands that it is acting responsibly. We can argue the finer points of that; he certainly has an arguable case. Where there can be no argument, however, is in the case of a person who steals the mass database and transmits it to other unauthorised individuals or organisations, or indeed newspapers, when he cannot possibly have read or in any way assessed whether the contents of that database had been properly collected or whether an abuse of the intelligence services’ powers had in fact taken place. That person is not acting responsibly, so the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson), whom I always admire, should be a little more careful before ascribing the term “brave whistleblower” to someone like Snowden.

Snowden is no more a whistleblower than someone like Julian Assange or anyone else who gets a mass of information and feels that it is right to publish it and put it into the public domain for no other reason than it is classified secret or top secret. Basically, their rationale can only be that they do not think anything should ever be classified secret or top secret. Once they admit that there is a purpose in classifying some information, and that some information ought to be kept secret, then we get into the area of who decides what should be kept secret and what should be the result of whistleblowing activities.

When I see somebody who blows the whistle on an identifiable abuse, I say, “Well done”, provided, of course, that they have used and exhausted all the right channels and were left with no alternative. But when I see someone who abuses their access to a massive database and then publishes it widely, I say that that is not whistleblowing; that is irresponsible—

[Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

Order.