Investigatory Powers Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Lucy Frazer Excerpts

Committee Debate: 11th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th April 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Joanna Cherry]

The hon. Lady may recall that, when I spoke about this on Second Reading, I said that I was not going to use the phrase “snoopers charter” because it is counterproductive, and nor was I going to use the phrase “mass surveillance,” but that I was going to use the phrase “suspicionless surveillance.” What is happening under section 94 of the Telecommunications Act will continue to happen if we pass these powers without questioning them properly: bulk acquisition warrants will authorise the acquisition of huge amounts of communications data on everybody living in the United Kingdom, which will then be analysed by computers at GCHQ without any further need for authorisation. My argument is that that is a form of suspicionless surveillance. While it may have some utility, as David Anderson has said, I am not convinced that it is either necessary or proportionate. I made some fairly detailed arguments last Thursday about the inadequacy of the operational case and will not repeat them.

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I do not want to misquote the gentleman from BT as I do not have his exact words in front of me, but when we heard evidence from him on our first day in Committee, he said clearly that much of that information was already being collected. I would also like to point out, as I did in a speech on the Floor of the House, that it is clear that Google is already accessing this material and people seem to accept that—Google is analysing the content of our emails.

[Joanna Cherry]

I will deal with the hon. and learned Lady’s second point first. I accept her legitimate concerns about the extent to which private entities such as Google and others collect private data. Parliament should be looking at that, although it is not really the subject matter of this Bill. However, the crucial difference between Google’s collection of comms data and the UK Government’s, or its agencies’, is that Google does not have the coercive power of the state. It may have great corporate power—in fact, there is no “may” about it—but it does not have the state’s coercive power.

The hon. and learned Lady’s first point was that these powers already exist. We found out only very recently, when the Home Secretary announced it on 4 November last year, the day the draft Bill was published, that the data were already being collected in bulk under section 94 of the 1984 Act. That had never previously been admitted by the Executive—apparently it was known only by a handful of Cabinet Ministers. Parliamentarians had previously been led to believe that communications data retention and acquisition took place under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, because that legislation specifically permits the agencies to require comms data on national security and serious crime grounds.

As I said earlier, when section 94 of the 1984 Act was passed, no one envisaged that those powers would be used in that way. The mere fact that the powers are already being used does not necessarily mean that they are proportionate or that we should not carefully scrutinise their necessity and proportionality now that they are being put on a proper statutory footing. In an intervention on the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras last week, I made the point that, if we follow the course of action the Scottish National party advocate, which is to remove parts 6 and 7 from the Bill until a proper operational case has been made, and if the agencies who are already using these powers say that they are legal under existing legislation, we will not be jeopardising national security, because the powers will continue to be used—although I stress that their underlying legality is open to question.

I do not want to take up much more time, but I want to make the point that, in the digital age we live in, communications data provide a detailed and revealing picture of somebody’s life. If we look at how comms data are defined under DRIPA and RIPA, we can see that they include the date, time, duration and type of communication, the type of communication equipment used, its location and the calling and receiving telephone numbers. That sort of information can reveal personal and sensitive information about an individual’s relationships, habits, preferences, political views, medical concerns and the very streets they walk on. That point was made in the Digital Rights case by the Court of Justice of the European Union:

“Those data, taken as a whole, may allow very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of the persons whose data has been retained, such as the habits of everyday life, permanent or temporary places of residence, daily or other movements, the activities carried out, the social relationships of those persons and the social environments frequented by them.”