Investigatory Powers Bill (Second sitting)

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)]

Q There has been a description of Tor as a facility that allows digital abuse of anonymous online activism. It is linked to encrypted information. I want you to say a bit about what effect encryption has on some of the work that you are involved with?

Alan Wardle: A lot of the activity that we take for granted online—shopping, banking and all the rest of it—could not be done without encryption, but of course, as with all these tools, encryption can be used for bad purposes by bad people. Similarly, with services like Tor and Freenet—the dark web—in the cases that we are concerned with, you get your most highly committed and dangerous offenders, quite often, particularly sharing very explicit images or videos of children being abused. Those services enable them to hide there. The police do the best they can, but, again, for a lot of that they will be dependent on traditional undercover techniques.

I think there is a question that is—I say this respectfully —beyond this Committee’s remit and beyond many of our remits. The direction of travel generally is that we are seeing greater moves to encrypt data as a matter of course, with things like Google Chrome browsers and so on. With browsers such as that, internet service providers cannot put in place the kind of protections they have, so they do not know what is going on there. That is a direction of travel and something that is worrying. It is clearly a global issue, but the police not being able to track what is going on due to increasing levels of encryption is a worry.

[Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

Q Just to pick up on the point made by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West about the missing child, is it right that, sadly, the victims of sex grooming rings do not surround themselves with friends and parents, because one of the tools that the groomers use is to isolate the victims, so that they have no one they can turn to in their hour of need?

Alan Wardle: That can be true. They can even turn the child against their family and friends as well.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q So in those circumstances, as you have said, the police need every tool that they can get to help those very vulnerable young children.

Alan Wardle: Absolutely. Again, as I have said, the issue of grooming is often about a period of time and establishing patterns of behaviour. Being able to gather evidence from a range of sources is really important.

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

Q Following on from that, in your work in the NSPCC, do you always see a willingness for children to open up and to tell people in a position of authority personal facts about themselves and their friends, or can it be quite difficult to coax out information about children who are friendly with the vulnerable?

Alan Wardle: It will depend. Generally, it takes quite a lot for a child to come forward and disclose. In recent years, we have seen a huge increase in the number of children who are reporting sexual abuse generally. It is going up across the UK, and was up by about a third last year. A large part of that is because of a greater willingness of children to come forward and talk about the abuse that has happened to them, but we know that it can take decades for people to come forward and talk about abuse.

What we are talking about, particularly sexual abuse, is a very personal thing, so the idea that a 15-year-old who is being groomed will just walk straight into a police station and start disclosing all these very personal things is generally not quite how it works.

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[Byron Davies (Gower) (Con)]

In my experience, the UK is regarded as a world leader in intelligence-led law enforcement and I am sure that you agree that the Bill will enhance your capability. Can you tell me how important to your work it is that this legislation applies extraterritorially?

Chris Farrimond: It is rare for serious crime to be investigated and to have no international aspect to it at all. Certainly in the case of the National Crime Agency, almost every single case that we investigate has got an international aspect to it, but I suspect that that is the same for both my colleagues as well. That means that communications data will almost certainly be held in a third country at some point, because we have been communicating with people in other countries. The extraterritoriality will at least give us the ability to ask for those data. I do not doubt that there will be some complications when it gets compared with the host nation legislation along the way, but, nevertheless, at the moment we have a very lengthy process to get material back from other countries, so if this can help in any way, shape or form in speeding that up, that will be a good thing.

Richard Berry: It certainly is a strategic priority for law-enforcement policing to look at how we can ensure, as Chris said, this fragmentation of data across server farms, in clouds and across several countries is increasingly a challenge for us, so any legislation that can help with that process will be particularly useful.

The other point that I would make, building on what you said in your introduction, is also quoted by the commissioner in the 2015 report. Communications service providers, certainly in the US, very much favour the British SPOC system, because there is a dedicated, rigorous system, whereas they could perhaps be approached individually by—I think, to quote them—one of “10,000 FBI agents”, all adopting a slightly different process. So we have got the right systems in place; I think it is really the relationships and the access that is critically important.

Simon Grunwell: I will just add that the internet obviously provides mobility and anonymity. We could have an attack from anywhere in the world, online, so we need to keep pace effectively with digital changes. Sometimes the only clue that we have as to who is criminally attacking us is a digital one. The ability to go extraterritorial to pursue that one clue could be vital.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q In the Government’s response to the pre-legislative scrutiny, they refer to a sample of 6,025 referrals to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre—CEOP—with which, I imagine, Mr Farrimond, you are very familiar. It says that of those more than 6,000 referrals, 862 could not be progressed and would require the ICR provisions in the Bill to have any prospect of being progressed. In other words, for at least 862 paedophiles out of that sample, you can go no further because you do not have the tools. Does that accord with your day-to-day working knowledge of this field?

Chris Farrimond: Yes, we get around 1,500 referrals per month, some 14% of which we cannot resolve. We cannot take them any further. Whether it is that number of paedophiles, or whether it is a smaller number who are sharing the same images, we cannot be sure, but the bottom line—the important thing—is that we cannot protect the child because we cannot resolve the data.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q Focusing on the point you have just made about protecting the child, a witness this morning referred to the collection of nude images and the security services apparently running facial recognition techniques on those images. Are such methods used to try to identify child victims so that law enforcement can find them?

Chris Farrimond: Yes, of course.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q Finally, on the extraterritoriality point, Europol is the EU’s information and intelligence-sharing agency in The Hague. What sort of data do law enforcement across Europe share, through Europol, to try to tackle serious organised crime and for counter-terrorism?

Chris Farrimond: Quite a lot, actually. We feed into the Europol databases. We also, in fairness, have bilateral relationships, particularly when it comes to specific investigations, but for criminal data on themes, trends and so on, we will feed it into Europol to see if there are any cross-matches with any other country experiencing the same criminality.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q So in those two areas—counter-terrorism and serious organised crime—this legislation could help not just our country, but our neighbours overseas as well.

Richard Berry: Yes, absolutely. From experience, I was involved in running a national operation on human trafficking, and we basically created a dataset from a significant amount of intelligence gained during that national operation over six months. It went straight into the analytical work files within Europol and we were able to map organised criminality right the way back to mainland China in some cases. The added value point, which is what you are making, very much comes from that sharing.

Simon Grunwell: Can I just add to that? A significant thread for us is organised tobacco smuggling, which is international by default. So it can only help.

[Gavin Newlands]

Q Just a follow-up to a question asked in the last panel about ICRs as they relate to mobile devices and third-party apps. You brought up easyJet earlier, and I have got an easyJet app on my phone. As far as I am aware, it creates a lot of ICRs as defined in the Bill. There is no way to differentiate between an ICR that is created manually or automatically by a third-party app. How would that limit the operational effectiveness of ICRs for you?

Chris Farrimond: To go back to my previous answer on this point, from your mobile record—the ICR from that—we would require your provider, Vodafone or whoever, to help us to understand which flight provider you were using. If they came back to us and said, “One of the domain names is easyJet”, we would say, “Thank you very much.” That is what we would expect from Vodafone. We would then go to easyJet and say—with the right authority signed off, obviously, and with the proportionality, necessity and everything that goes with that—“Can you tell us about his travel plans?” They would, hopefully, be able to do precisely that with the data that they hold on their flight details. But as for the actual app, all that we would look for from your provider would be to tell us that you have been making use of easyJet, and that would give us the next point in our investigation.

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[The Chair]

Actually, on this occasion I did not ask you to be brief, but thank you for being brief in the spirit that that was offered.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q Just so there is no mystery—people might ask themselves, “Crikey! What on earth do local authorities need these powers for?”—what sort of offences do local authorities investigate and prosecute?

Mark Astley: Local authorities have been provided with a wide remit in legislation to assist them in investigating a wide range of high crimes and serious crimes, which can range from rogue traders to dangerous goods and fake alcohol and tobacco.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q In some cases, fake alcohol can be fatal.

Mark Astley: It can be fatal, yes. There was a recent case of children’s clothing that was not fire retardant. It is important for those officers to react quickly to prevent any loss of life or serious danger to life.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q They also prosecute housing benefit fraud, don’t they?

Mark Astley: Not any more.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q Do they still prosecute landlord offences?

Mark Astley: Yes. Tenancy fraud offences as well. There is also internal fraud. There was one specific case where people were setting up rent accounts and filtering thousands of pounds from within the organisation.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q But, just as importantly, and probably more importantly, they can also safeguard the lives of people who are renting properties from landlords who, for example, are not keeping up to date with their gas certificates.

Mark Astley: That is correct.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q Just to be clear, under this Bill local authorities will not be entitled to internet connection records.

Mark Astley: That is correct.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q I do not know whether you have already done this, but could you briefly help us with the process that exists at the moment? What will happen after the Bill in terms of your organisation getting this information?

Mark Astley: In how we deal with an inquiry?

[Victoria Atkins]

Yes.

Mark Astley: Inquiries come through to our organisation electronically from an applicant, and our SPOC will work with the applicant to get the application either up to standard or cancelled because it is not appropriate. Once it is up to the required standard, the application is passed over to the designated person, who will then look to authorise it for proportionality. Once that has gone through, our systems provide a court pack, which is delivered to each individual applicant, and they then have to arrange for a court attendance to get judicial approval.

Differently, in Scotland they also have a legal representative process, except they have a fourth lock in place in that their legal representatives get involved and then go on to the sheriffs for judicial approval. It is then returned to us. Once we have that approval, we then obtain the information accordingly.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q Of course, the Bill also introduces the further safeguard of the criminal offence of making an unauthorised disclosure. In other words, there is also safety from the perspective of the telecommunications organisation, BT or whoever it is, knowing that if they do not make sure that you have complied with all of your duties, they themselves may be criminally responsible for giving you any information that they should not be giving you.

Mark Astley: Yes, and I think there is an intention to make the SPOC—the single point of contact—responsible for any recklessness or wilfulness in that misuse. That is another safeguard in place to ensure that there is no abuse or misuse of telecommunications data.

[The Chair]

With the permission of the Committee, I might suspend the sitting for 10 minutes at 10 minutes to 4 to allow people to have a quick break, because this is quite a long sitting. Is that with the permission of the Committee? Brilliant.

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[The Chair]

We really are pressed for time, gentleman. Can we have shorter answers so I can get as many colleagues in as possible?

Charles Clarke: My short answer is yes, I would have been in favour of introducing such a Bill. I think the question of updating with future-proofing is very important. On the timing, I cannot comment on whether the Home Secretary was right to introduce it now as opposed to in five years, or five years before, or whatever. The only factor that I would add to John’s remarks is that the capacity of the organisations that we are trying to contest is a very important issue and they are very wealthy, very effective, very scientific and very powerful, as John said. An assessment will be being made, which I am not privy to now, of how effective those organisations are now, which undoubtedly would have informed the Home Secretary.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q I have one question for Mr Clarke. You were the Home Secretary during the 7/7 bombings. How important was your experience of warrantry and your relationship with the security services in the hours and days that followed that terrible event?

Charles Clarke: Critically important. I believe that one of our strengths in the UK is that we have good relations between the different security services, the police and the political establishment in these areas. Indeed, with 7/7 itself, there had been substantial rehearsals of the various co-operations that needed to take place. I think that co-operation between the various agencies charged with the security of the country is exceptionally important, and 7/7 reinforced that for me very much.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q When you were standing up in the House of Commons at the Dispatch Box explaining what the security services and the police were doing, how important was your personal oversight of that, as opposed to just a judge doing it by themselves?

Charles Clarke: The implication of your point I could not agree with more. My personal experience was very important. It did lead me, personally, directly to have relations with the individuals in the security services who were involved with these things, and I think that helped my whole job as Home Secretary.

[Matt Warman]

Q You talked about updating the legislation and the importance of that. Do you see an internet connection record or something equivalent to it as a key part of updating this legislation for the world we live in now?

Charles Clarke: I do personally, yes.

Lord Reid: I do as well. Not to test the Committee, but two years after 7/7, on 6 August 2006, there was a plot to bring down seven airliners. There would have been 2,500 victims, and intercept was absolutely essential in protecting those lives—absolutely essential—with both the internet and telephone communications.