Intelligence and Security Services

Mark Field Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her intervention. No one is saying that we should make illegal the collection of communications data; that would be a problem. She is also right to say that we need evidence; we cannot have a vacuum. That is exactly why it is helpful to know some of what is being said. We have heard people who say that we should never publish anything that would inform this debate. I want an informed debate, and I am pleased that we can have one.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman refers to the Stasi and to the different cultural approach that we have here in the UK towards many of these issues. A view that is shared by people with a similar mindset—perhaps it is one that he thinks is not true—is that somehow the intelligence agencies are able to intercept at will. Will he go into some detail about precisely the protection—the amount of warranty and the legal framework—that is absolutely necessary before any internet account or telephone can be tapped?

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, and there are a number of routes to that. For communications data, he will be aware that no warrant is required. He will also be aware that, with the sole exception of evidence collected by local councils under RIPA, there is no judicial oversight of any kind at any stage. I am not aware of exceptions to that, and that is a weakness. There is an internal process—I do not doubt the good intentions of the people who work on this—but there is no independent external oversight from a judicial process, which is what many of us would like to see.

Let me return to the ISC. It works extremely hard, but its reports are redacted by the security services and the Prime Minister, and it is hard to know whether that is done in the interests of national security and not just to avoid embarrassment. Sir Francis Richards, a former senior intelligence official, has said that it is

“not a very good idea”

for an ex-Minister to head it. There is the problem of people being asked to scrutinise the consequences of decisions that they made, and that makes it hard to develop the right sort of relationship.

The ISC is under-resourced and not properly accountable to Parliament. There is a real issue to understanding the detailed technological components of much of this. I am not certain whether there is enough support to ensure that members understand the consequences of fake secure socket layer certificates and how phishing or man-in-the-middle attacks work. I am sure that the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) will be happy to explain them when she speaks later.

We need better scrutiny generally and not just of the Intelligence and Security Committee. We keep hearing messages about the risk of “going dark”—we heard all about that in relation to the draft Communications Data Bill. It is simply not true. There is far more information available now to the intelligence and security community and to the police than at any time in the past. People now carry mobile phone devices that keep track of where they are almost constantly. I do not blame the agencies. Of course I can see the argument that there will always be for having more information, but we must provide a counterbalance. Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, said:

“It’s very important for our intelligence services to have a kind of oversight which people have confidence in. I think that it may mean it is now the time to look again at the oversight.”

I agree with her.

We have seen further calls for even more information to be collected. The previous Government established the interception modernisation programme to create a vast database designed to log all details of text messages, phone calls and e-mails in the UK. In the interests of cross-party unity, I will not go on about other authoritarian measures: the drive for 90-day detention without charge, ID cards, control orders and allowing people to be forcibly relocated. They are all now things of the past, and I am pleased that that is the case.

Given such concerns, I was pleased with much of the coalition agreement. We Liberal Democrats insisted on a particular element, which was a commitment to ending

“the storage of internet and email records without good reason”.

That was accepted by both parts of the coalition. I am not sure whether the Home Secretary saw that, because she then pushed ahead with the draft Communications Data Bill, which would have required the storing of e-mail and internet records for everybody, which blows a hole through the idea of “without good reason”. It was envisaged that an extra £1.8 billion would be spent over 10 years to keep those extra records. That would have allowed the Home Secretary to require internet service providers to keep track of every website that everyone in the country goes to—everything that we do on Facebook or Google—with a huge growth in surveillance.