I shall speak to four different sets of amendments. As I said earlier, it is a difficult Bill to support, but I acknowledge the work that Ministers and the Government have done in trying to work with Government Members and Opposition Members to produce a Bill with which we can all begin to start to feel comfortable. I am not a lawyer, but amendments 147 to 152, which stand in my name, are designed to leave out clauses that provide for the modification of warrants. In my view as a non-lawyer, these changes seem, through a major modification, to have the potential to change the key components of a warrant. I wonder at what stage a new warrant should be drafted instead. How far can the warrant be modified before it needs to become a new warrant? The warrant provisions seem to be very wide ranging and very ill defined.
The next set comprises amendments 178 to 186, which try to refine the matters to which targeted equipment interference warrants may relate by removing vague and overly broad categories, including equipment interference for training purposes. People outside this place may not be aware of it, but when we talk about “equipment interference”, we are basically talking about hacking devices that can hack into mobile phones, computers, e-mail systems, or the apps that people use for their banking. “Equipment interference” is a nice way of saying state-authorised hacking, which is what we are talking about here. To me, this is an incredibly intrusive power, permitting real-time surveillance, as well as access to everything we store on our digital devices, from text messages to address books, calendars and emails, along with the websites people visit, which apps they use and how they use them.
The Bill also seems to me to provide for thematic hacking warrants, which amount to general warrants to hack groups or types of individuals in the UK. Hacking is not restricted in the Bill to equipment belonging to, used by or in the possession of particular persons or organisations. Even the director of GCHQ has apparently raised concerns about the breadth of the current definitions, which could apply to the equipment of a hostile foreign intelligence service. We here might say, “So what? So be it. That’s what they’re there for”, but what would we say if those warrants allowed all employees and family members of a particular company or the people who visit a particular religious venue or who live in a particular road to be hacked? Would we still say, “So what? Should we be bothered?” This may sound unlikely, but the draft equipment interference code of practice permits the targeting of people who are “not of intelligence interest”. If that is not carte blanche, I do not know what is,
because this is in effect allowing hacking the equipment of anybody anywhere in the UK or overseas, if the agencies choose to do so.