New spying legislation is needed, intelligence committee will say
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Version 0 of 1. New laws are needed to deal with security and privacy in the UK following revelations of the activities of Western intelligence agencies by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) says in a report released on Thursday. It is expected to strongly defend the need for intelligence agencies to collect bulk communications data on citizens – a tactic that was supported by Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, in evidence to the committee – so long as there are clearer rules on purpose, reporting, oversight and the length of retention. The foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, said this week the debate over the framework in which the agencies operate needs to be brought to an end early in the next parliament. The position is supported by the Labour and Liberal Democrat frontbenches who recognise that current legislation is outdated due to the speed of technological change. Parliament has agreed that emergency legislation passed last summer protecting the surveillance powers of the agencies must be revisited in 2016 when the laws expire. Separately, the next government will also have reports by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), set up at the request of Clegg, and by David Anderson, the independent reviewer of legislation. The ISC inquiry was set up in the wake of the Snowden revelations published in the Guardian and held unprecedented public evidence sessions from the heads of the intelligence agencies, as well as numerous secret hearings. The committee heard repeated evidence from the heads of the agencies in private and public that they complied with UK law, but defended the right to collect bulk data on the grounds that they had to have access to the entire haystack to find the needle. Hammond told the committee “being able to acquire the data on a large scale and then filter it down allows a series of filters and cross-references to be automatically used to identify that tiny element within the bulk data acquired that could be worthy of further analysis and ultimately review by a human pair of eyes”. He denied this represented mass surveillance, saying “mass intrusion arises at the point of the interrogation of the data not at the point when it is simply collected and filtered according to the automatic process”. They insisted the vast majority of data captured by agencies is not viewed or examined. It is expected the ISC will accept these reassurances, even though it is not clear the ISC had been informed of the scale of the activities of the agencies prior to the publication of the Snowden revelations. The ISC report will be examined to see if its members drawn from peers and MPs from all parties will recommend any changes to the system of oversight or a change to the way in which intercept warrants are issued for internal and external purposes. It is also likely to examine if the previous distinction between the content of data on the one hand and method and date of its transmission is breaking down, a claim made by Clegg in his evidence. The committee has also been asked to see if the external non-UK data and internal data is collapsing due to technological change so that the different systems of oversight of surveillance need to be merged. The committee is also likely to criticise Snowden for stealing the information from the NSA and for then allowing publication in the Guardian and other papers. Snowden is currently in exile in Russia. The committee has been criticised for being insufficiently critical of the intelligence agencies and for their excessive readiness to accept assurances form the agencies. Its work has been hampered in its final stages by the resignation of its chairman Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who was exposed in a Channel 4 covert investigation offering to sell his services to what he believed to a Chinese firm. Rifkind stood aside as chairman and is not now standing at the next election in his prime Tory seat of Kensington. He insists he has done nothing wrong and is seeking to clear his name with the parliamentary commissioner for standards. |