Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

The underlying issue that we are discussing in this important debate is whether we want the online space to be a law-governed area.

The radical libertarians, who seem to want the online space to be completely free, without boundaries, rights or responsibilities, would, I fear, unwittingly lead us into an anarchic place, where those with power and aggression dominated and where the weak and vulnerable suffered. Even the Swedish Pirate party told me that it wanted some rules of the game. We do not want a retreat into what I would call mediaevalism. When I say that, I mean that the internet should not be like the forest in the 13th century, which was completely outside the law. I know that there are some geeks who explore the dark net who see themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods, but the rest of us do not see them in that way.

One of the reasons for that is that we have seen an explosion in crime online and in particular crime against children. It is vital that we tackle that more energetically. The police believe that 60,000 people in this country are downloading illegal images of children all the time. We need to do more to tackle them, not less. That is the context in which we are looking at this legislation this afternoon. Given that, the requirement for telecommunications companies to keep comms data is necessary. The Mobile Operators Association told me that after Snowden and the European Court of Justice judgment, it wants legal certainty. It is no longer prepared to continue with a voluntary approach.

Our object with this legislation is not to shift the power of the state and the citizen; it is to reproduce in the online, telecoms spaces the rights and responsibilities of the real world, as my right hon. Friends the Members for Blackburn (Mr Straw) and for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) pointed out. Therefore, disclosing content to a limited number of public authorities with a warrant in pursuit of serious crime seems to me to be reasonable. This solution may be rather clunky, but at the moment it is the only practical one available.

If I may say so, this whole arena has been bedevilled by the problem of extraterritoriality. Whether companies are located in the US or Latvia, we see them evading their taxes or not having proper child protection standards. One of the useful things in the ECJ judgment on the Spanish man and the right to be forgotten was that it asserted that such companies are subject to European law. However, it is right that this piece of legislation puts that beyond doubt. Furthermore, it would be helpful to do more work to build the international consensus in this area. Just as we had to spend many years developing the international law of the sea, we now need to look at having a treaty basis for international co-operation in the online space.

As the timetable has been so rushed, it has not been possible to look at this area in a more comprehensive way. There are two areas in which we need to do further work. The first is on the issue of anonymity. I am talking not about people having nicknames on Twitter but about ensuring that we have a correspondence with people’s real and virtual identities, possibly using the device media access control address. That would help us to tackle crime in a less clunky way, and reduce it as well.

Finally, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) has tabled an amendment to improve the oversight of the public authorities, but we still do not have good oversight of the use put by private companies to all this data, and we need to beef up legislation in that area. It is clear that those companies think that they are entitled to sell on this information without people’s consent. I am disappointed that the Secretary of State for Justice, who has held on to his position in this reshuffle, has described as “mad” proposals to do more in that area.