Investigatory Powers Bill (First sitting)

Matt Warman Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Victoria Atkins]

Q I am driven to ask, Mr King, against your evidence that you do not know much about how security services work, how many lives you are willing to sacrifice for your very pure plan of privacy?

Eric King: None. I do not think that any lives should be sacrificed for a pure view of privacy. We need both; we need security and privacy. Both are values that we hold in this society and are values that we should be ensuring that we get right in the Bill. That is why it is so important that we have long scrutiny on this because we should not simply provide an unlimited set of powers to our security and intelligence agencies. They must have some, and they must be formidable powers, but they need to be checked.

They need to be provided for by Parliament. We need to have proper authorisation and oversight for that. That has been my work for the past five years. So, no, while I do not hold a security clearance, it does allow me to come before you and talk about all the things that I do know. Regrettably, if I did hold a security clearance, I would not be able to be in that position.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Q Building on that, the Joint Committee did ask for an operational case for bulk powers to be published, and that has been seen and assessed by the ISC who do have the security clearance that you do not have, who do have visibility on all of the things that you are not able to see. The ISC says that they are happy with that operational case. It seems to me that the more people know about this, the more comfortable they are with that operational case. I wonder whether you are questioning their judgment or simply saying that you disagree.

Eric King: No. It is certainly true that the more you see about some aspects of agency practice, you do get more reassured. Certainly, in the process of Investigatory Powers Tribunal cases that have taken place, I was pleased that there were areas that had safeguards when I did not originally think there were.

I have also been fantastically disappointed in other areas, where I thought there should have been very obvious safeguards, such as areas of legal professional privilege that were found wanting and unlawful by the IPT. I am afraid I have become a terrible judge on which bits I think the agencies have got right and which bits they have got wrong. I seem to be very poorly predicting it. On the operational case, I think the issue here is that we need a whole range of experts outside the ISC to be looking at this. I am not sure that it is the perfectly placed organisation or body to be looking at this. It has known about these powers and approved of them right the way through. I think that at this time, now that they are being put before Parliament plainly for the very first time, we should be looking to do what they have done in the US, which is to have an independent scrutiny of many of those cases, so that you can test them.

It is not enough simply to provide a list of cases where this worked. They need to be really looked at, because, as we found in the US, some powers that many thought would work, like the bulk acquisition of communications data, turned out not to be terribly effective. The 64 cases that the agencies in the US put forward, to say that these were powers that were needed, turned out to be false. Only one was of relevance, and it was not a terrorism case. So it is vitally important that we scrutinise them and have the time to do so.

[Lucy Frazer]

Q I would like to pick up on something that you said in your evidence was about internet connection records. I would just like to ask you first of all, do you respect the work of David Anderson?

Sara Ogilvie: Absolutely.