Intelligence and Security Services

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Dr Huppert]

It is absolutely right that we should have that debate. We have to agree it—we cannot just give carte blanche to people. I think that view is shared by everybody here. The hon. Gentleman is right. We must be balanced. None of us wants the details of exact techniques to be publicised. None the less, we do need to have the discussion about what is okay, what is not okay and where the line is drawn.

We know that the National Security Council was not even told of the scale and scope of the surveillance on our own citizens. We have heard that there were concerns about what would happen if the public knew what was happening. It was feared that it could lead to public debate and legal challenge—well, so be it. Public debate and legal challenge are an important part of the rule of law, and to avoid accountability through secrecy is simply not the solution.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is being extremely generous in taking interventions. A few moments ago, he said that he did not want detail to be released. The problem with the mass release of thousands of stolen documents is that nobody knows the detail before they release them and propagate them. Is that not rather different from whistleblowing on an individual error or abuse, when one is putting out there hundreds of thousands of documents that one has not even read oneself?

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to say that it would be irresponsible to publish hundreds of thousands of documents without having a look at them. That is why I am so glad that that is what The Guardian has explicitly not done. It has taken a responsible approach and managed to prevent that. We can imagine what could have happened if there had been a WikiLeaks-style publication. The hon. Gentleman should be concerned about the fact that a contractor was able to get hold of all the information, and that is a serious failure from the NSA and a great disgrace. If it cannot protect information to that level of security, it should be very worried. There are, I think, 850,000 people who could have had access to that information. Was the NSA certain that none of them would pass it on to a foreign power? Frankly, passing it on to The Guardian is probably about the safest thing that could have happened to it.

One of the functions of Parliament is to pass legislation and scrutinise the work of the Government. However, if we do not know what is happening, how can there be any scrutiny? We see legislation such as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 being used beyond the original intentions of the House, and that makes it impossible for Parliament to do its job. People say, “If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.” I suggest that they say that to the green activists infiltrated by the police or to members of the Lawrence family. Human behaviour changes when people know that they are being watched. Is that the world in which we want to live?

There is also an economic issue. Our actions are hitting our own economic interests. The internet is a huge factor in business here—some £110 billion of GDP. It is a dynamic market, and it can move. If people are concerned about the privacy of their data here, whether their personal information or important company secrets, they will simply move where they store that information. Germany is already launching schemes to encourage businesses to go there instead, with e-mail systems that guarantee that no data will leave German boundaries while e-mails are being sent, so there is not the problem of information going overseas and coming back again to be looked at. That will hit us financially, regardless of anything else.

We must look at the balance between intelligence gathering and privacy. We need to have oversight. Although I am pleased that we are having the heads of the intelligence and security services coming to a public forum, it has been incredibly hard to get that to happen. Of course national security should not be taken lightly, but the public needs to understand what is being done in their name.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

It is extremely welcome that Parliament is at last having a debate about the fact that a state employee can select on a computer any item about an individual—their address, phone number, mobile number, e-mail, passport number, credit card number or any of their log-ins to a web service—and thus access the content of their communications and details of who they communicate with, the full range of their internet use, their location and a great deal else. Of course, GCHQ is proud to insist that none of that is at all likely, because it always acts within the law—if only. Yes, the computer operator must provide a justification for the information that he is seeking, but that is not too hard when he is conveniently offered a drop-down menu to prompt his thoughts.

All such activity is supposed to be firmly controlled by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 but that Act is, I think, more about facilitating such exercises than curtailing them. RIPA is so poorly drafted—one almost wonders whether that was deliberate—and is open to such broad interpretation that it allows Government agencies such as GCHQ to do whatever they like. We are assured by the Home Office that it is concerned only with the metadata—the technical wherewithal of communications systems, rather than the documents—but the Snowden documents, as reported, tell us the truth:

“GCHQ policy is to treat it pretty much all the same whether it’s content or metadata.”

We are repeatedly given assurances that privacy is fully safeguarded, until we discover that the National Security Agency in the United States spends £250 million a year on weakening encryption. No doubt GCHQ is acting similarly on breaking commercially available security products.

The truth is, and has been for a long time, that the NSA in the States, via the Prism programme, and GCHQ in the UK, via Tempora, have acquired the capability to hoover up vast, untold quantities of personal data from the undersea cables that carry internet data on a colossal scale in and out of the UK, and to do that without any check or accountability. Does that matter? I think that it does. Tempora already allows GCHQ the capacity to collect more than 21 petabytes a day. To put that in context, it is the equivalent of sending all the data in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours. Two years ago, there were already 550 British and American analysts ploughing through the Tempora database. The balance between safeguarding personal safety and tracking down terrorism and serious crimes has unquestionably been drastically breached. The security agencies are operating under outdated law, despite the recent changes that we all know about, without a genuine public mandate.

What should be done? It was decided at the end of the previous Parliament that all Select Committees, except one, should be elected by the House, and not selected by the Whips and beholden to the party leaderships, as hitherto. The one exception was of course the Intelligence and Security Committee, which operates in a totally different way, untouched by the wave of accountability that swept through the Commons in 2009-10, in response to the revelations of the expenses scandal.

[Dr Lewis]

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will—I suspect that he will—enlarge on that point, but will he mention the fact that that one Committee is different from all the others, because it is the only one that has access to highly classified material? Surely, that is the relevant point.

[Mr Meacher]

That is perfectly true. The real issue is whether that justifies its being outside the system of accountability of the Houses of Parliament. In my submission, it does not. Safeguards might be required, but not the construction of a different type of Committee, whose Chair and members are appointed by the Prime Minister, to replace as and when he or she wishes, and which sits in private.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I genuinely congratulate my near namesake, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), not only on securing this debate but on the way in which he presented his case and the exceptionally generous way in which he handled interventions. I hope that it will not damage his credibility on the left too much if I point out how very strongly I agreed with at least one of the points that he made in response to my intervention on him.

There are three questions that I want to address. First, on which the hon. Gentleman responded, why is it so easy for junior personnel to engage in mass leaking? Secondly, is it easier than before, as he suggested, to track or spy on people? Thirdly, who should rightly be regarded as a whistleblower? That is the point that I was touching on when I intervened on him. On the first question, he is absolutely right. If these secrets are so sensitive, there is something terribly wrong with the system that allows an Army private or a junior technician access to them.

[Dr Huppert]

indicated assent.

[Dr Lewis]

I am glad to see the hon. Gentleman endorsing what I am saying. Any system that allows tens of thousands of top secret documents to be downloaded by such junior personnel in such quantity must be at risk.

In an absolutely outstanding contribution to the debate, the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood)—I do congratulate him on his measured and exceptionally well-informed contribution—referred to the whole business of Enigma and the ultra secret of world war two.

Colleagues might remember that in 1974 the book, “The Ultra Secret”, perhaps regrettably—historians are grateful—revealed the secret that, as a result of the development of the Enigma machine, we were decrypting codes during the war that people thought were unbreakable. The book was published. Its author was F. W. Winterbotham. If I remember correctly, his role was to be in charge of the signals liaison units, which comprised members of the special services who were involved in the distribution of the Enigma decrypts and who were spread around all parts of the military infrastructure that received that intelligence. In other words, they were crucially aware of the need to keep top secret material secure. As such, they had special security arrangements to prevent anything like the Snowden case and the Bradley Manning case from happening. There is a huge gap in the security arrangements for the handling of such material.

On whether it is easier than before to track and spy on people, as the hon. Member for Cambridge has suggested, in one sense, he is absolutely right. We have electronic devices that offer more ways in. In another sense, though, he is not quite right. The problem is that in the past, when we wanted to track or spy on someone, all we had to do was to get a court order to enable the interception of mail or telephone calls. Now, with so many new systems of communication, it is actually much harder to track and spy on people who ought to be tracked and spied upon, according to the process of law, because there are so many other ways to communicate.

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and for some of his earlier comments. There is an interesting issue. Communications data are increasingly available to the police, but records of the locations where people had phones are now kept for a year. We can join the dots to find out exactly where somebody went. That information is available to the police and is used in many investigations. That would never have been available before. He is right that there are some safeguards; but 20 or 30 years ago, there would have been no way to say, “Three months ago, where was Dr Julian Lewis at any particular moment?”

[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.