Intelligence and Security Services

Michael Meacher Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

It is extremely welcome that Parliament is at last having a debate about the fact that a state employee can select on a computer any item about an individual—their address, phone number, mobile number, e-mail, passport number, credit card number or any of their log-ins to a web service—and thus access the content of their communications and details of who they communicate with, the full range of their internet use, their location and a great deal else. Of course, GCHQ is proud to insist that none of that is at all likely, because it always acts within the law—if only. Yes, the computer operator must provide a justification for the information that he is seeking, but that is not too hard when he is conveniently offered a drop-down menu to prompt his thoughts.

All such activity is supposed to be firmly controlled by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 but that Act is, I think, more about facilitating such exercises than curtailing them. RIPA is so poorly drafted—one almost wonders whether that was deliberate—and is open to such broad interpretation that it allows Government agencies such as GCHQ to do whatever they like. We are assured by the Home Office that it is concerned only with the metadata—the technical wherewithal of communications systems, rather than the documents—but the Snowden documents, as reported, tell us the truth:

“GCHQ policy is to treat it pretty much all the same whether it’s content or metadata.”

We are repeatedly given assurances that privacy is fully safeguarded, until we discover that the National Security Agency in the United States spends £250 million a year on weakening encryption. No doubt GCHQ is acting similarly on breaking commercially available security products.

The truth is, and has been for a long time, that the NSA in the States, via the Prism programme, and GCHQ in the UK, via Tempora, have acquired the capability to hoover up vast, untold quantities of personal data from the undersea cables that carry internet data on a colossal scale in and out of the UK, and to do that without any check or accountability. Does that matter? I think that it does. Tempora already allows GCHQ the capacity to collect more than 21 petabytes a day. To put that in context, it is the equivalent of sending all the data in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours. Two years ago, there were already 550 British and American analysts ploughing through the Tempora database. The balance between safeguarding personal safety and tracking down terrorism and serious crimes has unquestionably been drastically breached. The security agencies are operating under outdated law, despite the recent changes that we all know about, without a genuine public mandate.

What should be done? It was decided at the end of the previous Parliament that all Select Committees, except one, should be elected by the House, and not selected by the Whips and beholden to the party leaderships, as hitherto. The one exception was of course the Intelligence and Security Committee, which operates in a totally different way, untouched by the wave of accountability that swept through the Commons in 2009-10, in response to the revelations of the expenses scandal.

[Dr Lewis]

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will—I suspect that he will—enlarge on that point, but will he mention the fact that that one Committee is different from all the others, because it is the only one that has access to highly classified material? Surely, that is the relevant point.

[Mr Meacher]

That is perfectly true. The real issue is whether that justifies its being outside the system of accountability of the Houses of Parliament. In my submission, it does not. Safeguards might be required, but not the construction of a different type of Committee, whose Chair and members are appointed by the Prime Minister, to replace as and when he or she wishes, and which sits in private.

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Kensington) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman cannot get away with that. Is he completely unaware that the Parliament of which he is a Member passed legislation providing that from now on Parliament will have the last word on who is appointed to the Intelligence and Security Committee? If Parliament does not like the names recommended by the Prime Minister it can reject them, and continue to reject them until it is satisfied with the names brought forward.

[Mr Meacher]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman is correct, but the question is whether that is an effective way for the legislature to make the choice. It is all very well to say that there is a provision that will work if it is used diligently and systematically by the House. I submit that it is not, and that we need to change it.

[Dr Huppert]

It might help the right hon. Gentleman to know that clause 1 of the Justice and Security Act 2013 states:

“A person is not eligible to become a member of the ISC unless the person…is nominated for membership by the Prime Minister, and…is not a Minister of the Crown.”

[Mr Meacher]

Of course, that is the point. The House can reject a name that is proposed by the Prime Minister. It cannot propose its own name, as happens with the other Select Committees.

When the Committee has completed an inquiry, often, of course, at the behest of the Prime Minister—although I am aware that it can pursue its own investigations—it sends its report directly to the Prime Minister. That is a secret back channel within the existing power structure, with no direct accountability to the public. The Prime Minister can modify the report in any way he or she chooses and then publish it without any indication of the changes, or publish it in redacted form, or not publish it at all. That is not serious scrutiny. It is a safe cover for the Prime Minister, to give the impression that a difficult and sometimes, for the Government, embarrassing issue has been properly investigated, when, in fact, MI5 or GCHQ disclose to the Committee only what they choose, and the Prime Minister reveals what he or she wants to. Genuine accountability in such matters is needed, and is long overdue.

The Intelligence and Security Committee should, like all other Select Committees, be elected by Parliament, although I think that the Government should choose the Chair. Where the security services are unwilling to disclose documents on national security grounds, the Committee should have the right to ask the Information Commissioner to review the documents and decide whether their disclosure would genuinely put national security at risk—in which case of course there would be no question of their being revealed—as opposed to merely being inconvenient to the security services or the Government, as has so often proved the case in the past. The Information Commissioner’s decision would be final, and the Committee’s report, once finalised, would be issued to the House for public consumption, not to the Prime Minister.

It will be said that we should trust the security services, which look after the nation’s safety—a vital role—and let them get on with the job. We did that, of course, and then found out, not from them but from the Snowden files, what the NSA in the US and GCHQ in Britain were really up to, including monitoring the phones of Angela Merkel and 35 other world leaders—one wonders how much else—and that all assurances about privacy were not worth the e-mails that they were written on. The Intelligence and Security Committee never found out or told us. We were assured by its current Chair—whom I greatly respect—that the security services always acted strictly in accordance with the law, that all operations were officially approved and that there was nothing to worry about. It was only later that we discovered that in fact GCHQ, through the Tempora programme, had devised a way of obviating all that.

It is high time, not for the ISC to tweak its existing work programme to respond to the global furore, as seems to be proposed, but for an independent committee of inquiry to be established to examine the issue thoroughly and systematically, taking full account of international experience, particularly in the United States, and to report to the House, not to the Prime Minister.

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Kensington) (Con)]

These are serious matters, but may I start on a slightly lighter note? It has been reported today that Mr Snowden has obtained new employment in Moscow—this is quite true—on a Russian website. We have been told that which website it is could not be revealed on the grounds of security, so there is clearly a need for a Russian whistleblower, if not Mr Snowden.

In the time available, I will concentrate on two matters. The first is that the ISC is quite willing to be criticised, but I think that all its members would prefer to be criticised by people who have taken the trouble to find out what Parliament has approved in the past 12 months and how the new ISC has been constituted.

When the current Committee came into existence at the beginning of this Parliament, our first work was to review all the existing powers. We came to the conclusion that the original 1994 Act was out of date and needed to be replaced. We put a series of recommendations to the Government, who accepted 99% of them, and the Opposition were of a similar mind.

I remind right hon. and hon. Members, or those who are apparently not aware of them, of the fundamental changes that have been made. First, under the new legislation, we now report to Parliament, not to the Prime Minister. Secondly, as I have said, Parliament has the last word on who the Committee members are. Thirdly, contrary to the suggestion by the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher) that the Prime Minister should continue to appoint the Chairman, the Committee will in future choose the Chairman from among its own members. That is a big change.

My second point is that the powers have been transformed. For all the years since the Committee came into existence, we could not require intelligence agencies to give us information that they did not wish to provide. We could make requests, to which they often acceded, but we could not require them to do so. The new legislation requires them to respond and give us the information we seek.

Until now, the legislation did not even mention the most important part of agencies’ activities—their operations. Any Committee involvement in operations was incidental or at the request of the Prime Minister, or it was done voluntarily when agencies were willing to co-operate. Now we have not just the opportunity but the right to demand from the agencies all information regarding nationally significant operations, including retrospectively. They cannot refuse; it is our right.

The right hon. Gentleman and other critics may not be aware of this, and perhaps there is no reason why they should be, but I must tell them that one of the changes taking place—for example, in respect to our current inquiry on Woolwich—is that, although as part of our investigations the agencies normally sent us a report with such raw material or parts of their files as they thought appropriate, we now have the right, which we are exercising, to send our staff into GCHQ, MI5 or MI6 to look at files that are relevant to our investigation and they, not the agencies, decide what the Committee might want to see. To be fair to the agencies, we are doing so with their full co-operation. It is a cultural revolution in the agencies’ work to allow people who are not even part of their staff or involved in government into their building. That transformation in the Committee’s powers ought to be borne in mind by those who say that the present Committee—not the former one—does not have the powers to do the required job.

[Mr Meacher]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman explain why the Committee did not find out about the Tempora programme when it began to operate?

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

The right hon. Gentleman does not have the faintest idea whether the Committee was aware of programmes of any kind. We are given classified information, and the whole point of an independent Committee having access to top secret information, whatever that is, is that we do not announce what such information is. If he can devise a system whereby secret information can be made available to all law-abiding British citizens, without its being simultaneously made available to the rest of the world, I am interested in hearing about it, but I do not think that he is likely to meet that requirement.

In the short time available, I want to deal with the fundamental challenge mentioned by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), who secured the debate, as well as by those who have supported him. Like others, they have said that we are living in a society in which, to use their term, there is “mass surveillance”. If that means anything, it is an accusation: the implication is that all our e-mails are or will be examined by GCHQ—as it chooses and by its own methods—as though something like that was now available. They seem totally to misunderstand or not to refer to the reality of what happens with modern technology, so in the brief time available, I will share with them what they ought to know. It is not secret, but is in the public domain.

Modern computers, which can indeed digest vast amounts of e-mails or communications data, are programmed to run using certain selectors, such as an e-mail address that might belong to a terrorist or some other information relating to terrorism. They are programmed to go through millions and millions of communications and to discard, without their having been looked at—no human eye looks at any of the e-mails—all those to which selectors are not attached.

Of the totality processed by computers, perhaps 0.01% will have selectors that the computer has been programmed to look for. The communications of the other 99.99%— covering virtually every citizen of this country, bar a very small number—are never even looked at by the computer, other than in relation to a selector, such as an e-mail address. Even for the tiny minority identified by the computers as potentially relevant to terrorism, if GCHQ, MI5 or MI6 want to read the content of any of the e-mails, they have to go to the Secretary of State for permission. Under the law, only if they are given permission can the content be read.

To say that we are living in a mass surveillance society is to make a wonderful allegation that sounds vaguely sinister, but the reality is that the e-mails of pretty well everyone in the Chamber are not being intercepted or read.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Brokenshire]

It is also important to highlight that, at a political level, the intelligence agencies are ultimately accountable to the Prime Minister, but on a day-to-day basis it is Secretaries of State—primarily my right hon. Friends the Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary—who are responsible for balancing the need to protect national security and the need to fulfil their duty to protect the British public against the potential intrusion on individuals’ rights to privacy that could be caused by intelligence activity. I know from working alongside my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary how much attention she gives to that role.

The interception of communications commissioner also has such oversight in relation to that intelligence activity, and in taking decisions about whether to authorise the use of intrusive powers—for example, to intercept communications—he must be satisfied that such measures are legal, necessary, proportionate and carefully targeted.

[Mr Meacher]

On the question of legality, is it not the case that the Home Secretary was extremely keen to get the Communications Bill through the House of Commons in order to legalise activities that GCHQ had been carrying out for years, notably—as we now believe—the Tempora programme?

[James Brokenshire]

I say clearly to the right hon. Gentleman, as the Foreign Secretary said when he responded originally on this issue, that GCHQ and our intelligence agencies act within the law, a point rightly made earlier by the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood).

The points about the proposals on communications data are about the changing nature of what we see, which includes ensuring that our law enforcement agencies are able to continue to do the job that they do today in bringing criminals to justice and using communications data as evidence in court. That is very different from the intelligence agencies’ roles and from GCHQ’s mission, which is external—looking outside rather than within the UK.

It is also important to note the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) about the role of the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson, who has done some very important work and continues to do so.

It is this multi-faceted oversight that complements rigorous internal controls within the agencies themselves. The agencies’ recruitment and training procedures are all designed to ensure that those operating within the ring of secrecy can be trusted to do so lawfully and ethically. A culture of compliance with both the letter and the spirit of the law pervades everything that they do.

In the short time I have left, I should quickly address some of the points that have been raised. I can obviously assure hon. Members, for example, about the resourcing of the ISC. It has raised around a 30% uplift in its resources, and when it has a full staffing complement it will have more staffing than virtually any Select Committee. It is right to highlight the important work undertaken through the ISC and the changes that have been made to it by the Justice and Security Act 2013, which have been commented on by right hon. and hon. Members. An ongoing investigation is taking place into the events in Woolwich in May, work that the ISC is conducting very carefully and with great diligence.

This has been an important debate, highlighting the strength of the scrutiny that we have and the different layers of scrutiny that operate in this country. I believe that we have every reason to be proud of those oversight arrangements and of the work of our agencies.

Question put and agreed to.