Reports into Investigatory Powers — House of Commons, 2015-06-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Nicholas William Peter Clegg (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I speak as someone who, as the Home Secretary knows, had a hand in the commissioning of this excellent report. The right hon. Lady will remember with fond, misty-eyed nostalgia the debates that she and I had on this complex, fraught and all-important area of public policy. One of the consequences of those debates and disagreements was that a number of reports were commissioned, including David Anderson’s. We look forward, as the Home Secretary said, to the publication of the report by RUSI. I strongly endorse her compliments to David Anderson and to the authors of the other reports, and I join in all that has been said in complimenting the professionalism and integrity of the work of the agencies—professionalism and integrity that I found on display daily in my work with them in government. As I will explain, my quibbles were invariably with proposals emanating from the Home Office about what new power should make its way on to the statute book, rather than with the day-to-day conduct of our highly effective intelligence agencies On the back of this excellent report from David Anderson, we have an unusual opportunity to try to reset the balance between privacy and liberty on the one hand, and safety and security on the other, in a digital age. As the Home Secretary rightly pointed out, all too often this debate is falsely caricatured, as if people who worry about security do not worry about liberty, and people who worry about liberty do not worry about security. In this area, as in so many other walks of life, it is necessary to strike the right balance. To somewhat misquote Benjamin Franklin, if we give up our liberty to gain a little security, we will deserve neither and lose both. As the shadow Home Secretary said, we should be striving to strengthen both liberty and security in tandem I am certainly no slouch when it comes to introducing new surveillance powers on to the statute book when it is demonstrably the case that doing so makes us safer and is necessary in order to keep up with new technologies. That is one of the reasons, as the Home Secretary is aware, why I always advocated legislating, as we have done, to enable enforcement agencies to match IP addresses to handheld devices, and why we legislated in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014—the acronym is DRIPA, unfortunately—to improve data-sharing between UK and US enforcement agencies. However, I have always drawn the line—I did in government and I do now—at proposals that I feel are either not based on proper evidence or not adequately proportionate and transparent. It is in that light that I would like to turn to a few of the points made by David Anderson I will not dwell on the points that have already been made about introducing a judicial role in the issuing of warrants, but I want to underline the shadow Home Secretary’s point that David Anderson made his case on the basis not just of principle, by pointing out that our practice is significantly out of line with how warrants are issued in other analogous jurisdictions, but of his observation—this was surprising, at least to me—that there might be operational value in introducing a judicial element in the issuing of warrants, as it would enable us more readily to secure data from American communications service providers, which are used to that kind of system I want to dwell on David Anderson’s comments on the draft Communications Data Bill—the so-called snoopers charter. David Anderson is scathing in his report about the proposals in the Bill to force UK network providers to collect and store third-party data relating to services operated by companies based overseas. He says quite unambiguously that, "there should be no question of progressing this element of the old draft Bill until such time as a compelling operational case has been made". It is worth reflecting on that for a moment. I was told categorically and repeatedly in government that that was absolutely necessary for the safety of the public; that public safety would be in jeopardy if I did not endorse it. David Anderson has now found that no operational case has been made for that. Echoing an earlier question to the Home Secretary, I seek clarity from the Government on whether the forthcoming Bill will contain third-party data provisions, which David Anderson has said it should not In the light of that, I think that we should treat other proposals that do not have a clear evidence base or rationale—most importantly, the Home Office’s proposal to require CSPs to store so-called weblogs—with an equal amount of healthy and considered scepticism.