Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill — House of Lords, 2015-01-26
Topic: Law and Crime
Paul Strasburger (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I confess that I do not really know where to start. I think it is true that all the previous speakers are former members of what I would call the security establishment: they are former policemen, former Home Office Ministers or former spies—I am not sure in which category I would put the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong. I think I am the first to speak more as an individual and a non-politician; my history before I came to this House was quite outside of politics, in business As we have heard, these amendments regurgitate large parts of the utterly discredited draft communications data Bill. They seek to slip into the Bill large parts of the highly controversial snoopers’ charter, word for word. With just one exception, the amendments fail to correct any of the many significant, fundamental and deal-stopping flaws identified by the Joint Select Committee on the draft Bill that reported at the end of 2012. I had the honour of being a member of that Select Committee under the very able chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Blencathra. The committee sat for five months; it met 20 times, including three times in the Recess; it interviewed 54 witnesses and received 19,000 e-mails from members of the public. As we have heard, its members included two former Cabinet members, Lady Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary, one noble Lord who has since become a government Minister, an ultra-loyal Conservative MP and a former Conservative Home Office Minister. That was hardly a hotbed of lefty liberals. The committee reached a unanimous verdict that the draft Bill was badly written, far too broad in scope and badly costed, and noted that the security agencies would do better to make better use of the information they already had That last observation is made particularly pertinent by the revelations following the atrocities in Woolwich and Paris, in which all the terrorists were well known to the security agencies long before the events. In all, there were about 100 criticisms of the draft Bill in the Select Committee’s report and many of them were serious and fundamental. As far as I can see, these amendments deal with just one of those criticisms, which means that they are still infested with the remaining 99 flaws. I will not detain the House by going through each of them, but noble Lords may read about them at their leisure in the report, which I commend to the House When Edward Snowden released his revelations, about six months after the Select Committee reported, we learnt that GCHQ’s Project Tempora is the world’s first "full-take" data interception system, collecting 100% of internet traffic—content as well as metadata. Former committee members were surprised, and some were angered, by that revelation because during the committee’s proceedings Home Office officials had three times claimed that there was a 25% capability gap in what the agencies could collect—although those same officials were not able to justify that figure of 25%, even in private sessions. Snowden showed that the 25% so-called gap probably does not exist at all and that in fact the agencies are already, and have been for some time, acquiring far more data than the draft Bill would have delivered—and without the knowledge or consent of Parliament and the people.