Security Services: Supervision

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Soley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to review the supervision of the security services.

[Lord Soley]

My purpose in bringing this Question before the House is to try to initiate some long-term thinking on the way in which we supervise our security services, the impact of high technology, the pace of change compared to our legislative process, and, importantly, the freedom and security of the internet.

Let me begin by saying that there is no reason to doubt the importance of the security services to the freedom of the people of this country and their safety. I say that not least because of my memory of my involvement in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. Equally we have to be clear about what we are defending. We are defending freedom and a way of life, which, as we all know in this place, means that we have to have a good system of parliamentary accountability for the security services. I do not take the view that accountability has been totally useless, or whatever some people have alleged, but there is considerable room for change, and we ought to start addressing that in some detail, which is why I want a slightly longer debate than we are able to have in this one hour.

My first point to the Minister, to which I hope he will give some long-term thinking, is the pace of change in technology. It is a crucial problem and has been so for some years. Technology, particularly information technology, moves so fast that the ink is hardly dry on the Acts of Parliament that we pass before they are out of date. We really have to find a new way of dealing with this. There are a number of possible options, but the one I have looked at with some interest—and I know that this has been referred to in discussions about the data communications problem—is a hybrid between a Select Committee and a legislative Committee that looks at the constantly changing technology and how to bring changes into effect in existing legislation. We have a number of ways in which we do this in other areas in the House. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which I was on, is one way of doing it; we ought to consider that. This House is very strong on science and technology, and we have here people with a great knowledge of information technology. The suggestion that I make to the Minister—although it is a matter for the House authorities as much as for him, but support from the Government would be helpful—is that he look at whether we could introduce a committee process which would enable a detailed look at the way the rapid change in science and technology affects our legislation, not just on the security services, although clearly that is the most important one in the current context.

The other issue I ought to say in opening is that although I would disagree entirely with Snowden’s release of all this information, which I think was grossly irresponsible, in my humble judgment, if he were put on trial before a jury in this country, he would probably be found not guilty on the basis of a public interest defence. There is probably enough in what he has done that revealed to us things that we did not know about which would give him a good defence in that area. I do not think the Government are necessarily thinking of it, but getting into a battle either with newspapers, Snowden or anybody else on this would likely be a losing battle. It would be far better to address the issue than to deal with it that way. I only wish that Russia and China could have a Snowden as well; actually, it might even the field up a little bit.

I turn now to the internet. Next year, it will be 25 years since the invention of the internet by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I hope we will find ways of celebrating that because it is, in my judgment, by far the most important way in which the people not just of Britain, but of the world have been able to communicate, and it has been a great engine for freedom. However, what has happened recently has been a gift to some of the more authoritarian countries and some of the more authoritarian organisations which would like to close down the freedom of and access to the internet. One of the things that is most troubling about what has been happening with the security services is this business of interception of the internet services. For example, the Google fibre-optic cable being breached is a matter for concern. One has to ask whether the Prime Minister, any other Minister or the intelligence committee knew that that was about to happen. Was it ever considered by them?

This brings us straight into the third and main point of this debate, which is whether we can improve the way our security services are subject to parliamentary oversight. Much of the comment made outside has been based on an assumption—a wrong assumption—that because the security services, through the Tempora system, have been hoovering up lots of information, all of that information has been read or looked at. It has not been; it is the case that in Britain, you need to have a warrant if you are going to look at the content of these things. What troubles me is that, although you might need a warrant in the UK, you do not necessarily need it overseas. There is a particular problem here in that the communications network between Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States—the so-called “five eyes”—are interchanging information all the time and are using our systems. Therefore, it must be said that, given that the United States is now accepting that it intercepted the phone of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of a friendly and liberal power, now with a very good constitution—not least because we wrote it—the very least that should have happened is that the British Government should have been aware of it. However, It was probably done with some interaction with GCHQ, even if they did not know about it. In other words, I suspect that the inter-linkage between the National Security Agency of the United States, GCHQ here and the other surveillance organisations in New Zealand, Australia and Canada is not really supervised by any of the parliamentary structures in any of these countries.

We have a very real problem, which is far greater than we have had in the past, about how we carry out effective oversight of security organisations operating on all our parts. The Intelligence and Security Committee is doing very good work, and I greatly welcome the way they have opened up their processes in recent times. I am sure the Minister will want to record that. I still say that it is not enough, and that we should have a long, hard look at the way in which we oversee this international co-operation, because it means we will be involved in some of the things we might say we would not do, like tapping the Chancellor of Germany’s telephone. I do not know whether that was done as the result of the ability of the Tempora programme in GCHQ, but a Minister should have known and should have been able to give a clear reply of, “Yes, we did know that” or, “No, we did not know that”. I suspect that the answer is that we did not; in fact, I am almost sure of it, but it might have been done as a result of that co-operation. That linkage is extremely important, and we cannot ignore it.

There are other areas of this supervision that are critical to us. MI5 and MI6 have been quite good recently at opening up and speaking in public, but I can not say the same about GCHQ. GCHQ needs to be much more open than it has been, with all the difficulties that implies. When I suggested a while ago that GCHQ ought to be much more receptive to visits from parliamentarians, whether of this House or the House of Commons, the answer was, “Well, we are nervous about some MPs or Members of the Lords”. My response to that is, “Well, I am nervous about some of the people who work for GCHQ”, more than one of whom I have met and would have some anxiety about. We cannot address it that way; you have to say that they must be accountable to Parliament and we must be able to have those discussions. As MI5 and MI6 have discovered, you can actually deal with the difficult questions and challenges that you face in a parliamentary system. It is that which makes us stand out above the others and makes us different from some of the other countries that are delighted about what Snowden is doing—but he is not, of course, looking at their own systems, which they would desperately hide from all of us.

I have finished slightly within my time, not least because I hope to give a little more time to others and to extend this debate on other days, but I ask the Minister to take away and look at this business of how we legislate for high-technology change in a slow legislative process.