[Mrs Linda Riordan in the Chair] — Backbench business — Intelligence and Security Services

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 1:30 pm on 31 October 2013.

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Photo of Julian Huppert Julian Huppert Liberal Democrat, Cambridge 1:30, 31 October 2013

My hon. Friend makes a helpful point. Of course, I do not have a list of every single intelligence service. The difference is between trying to break encryption after things have been encrypted and trying to break the entire system, leaving a back door open, which fundamentally means that anybody can access it. That is different from brute-force methods or other techniques used.

My hon. Friend makes the good point that this is an international issue. How would we feel if it were not GCHQ or the American National Security Agency but the Chinese who were involved? How would we react if the Chinese admitted that they had been tapping the Prime Minister’s phone? Would we be annoyed and concerned, or would we say, “That’s fine; that’s business as usual”? Clearly, we do not take the situation seriously enough.

For example, we allow the Chinese company Huawei to supply a lot of the equipment that makes up the core of our infrastructure. I suspect that our intelligence agents would not miss the chance to install some equipment if we were given the chance to put in the backbone of the Chinese internet, so we should not assume that the Chinese would miss such an opportunity. That was criticised by the Intelligence and Security Committee, which highlighted the disconnect between the UK’s inward investment policy and its national security. If we can understand it sometimes, we should understand it more broadly.

A change is occurring. Individual surveillance is one thing, but the mass hoovering up of information enabled by new technologies has changed the system completely. It means that suspicion no longer comes first. I think that very few people think it inappropriate to target individuals where there is a serious suspicion of wrongdoing, but in the new approach, we are all suspects whose personal histories can be foraged through if ever there is interest in us later.

The Foreign Secretary spoke at the conference of his passionate conviction that all human rights should carry full force online—not just the right to privacy, but the right to freedom of expression. I agree. How we choose to respond to the challenge will define the age that we live in. As parliamentarians and as Parliament, we must be at the heart of this debate.

In America, Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has spoken out about the revelations that America has been spying on Angela Merkel in Germany and on 34 other world leaders. She said:

“Congress needs to know exactly what our intelligence community is doing.”

She then said:

“It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary.”

She criticised the fact that her committee was not satisfactorily informed. I have not yet heard the Chair of our Intelligence and Security Committee being so outspoken. Perhaps we will hear from him later in the debate, but would he know whether he was not being told things in the way that Dianne Feinstein was not?

There are differences in the debate between the UK and the USA. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights sets out a contract between the state and its citizens with a bias towards favouring individual liberty and privacy. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the debate is happening so loudly in the US but not here.

In Germany, too, there is a loud debate. It is deeply concerned about what has happened. It has the history of the Stasi, which operated within the law as it then stood, but well beyond the bounds of morality and ethics. I am sure that no member of our current intelligence agencies would dream of following the Stasi’s lead; I do not suggest that for a moment. Germany is aware of what can happen when such systems go wrong.