My Lords, I cannot resist the opportunity to add my ha’penny-worth, to respond to my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne, and to acknowledge proudly the label of pesky Liberal Democrat. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Blair, for saying that he at least does not disagree that the Liberal Democrats have a position of principle here. However, I disagree with him about the 2004 Spanish election. The Partido Popular did not lose the election because of the bombing being by Islamists. It lost because it tried to misrepresent those bombings as being by ETA, which was against the advice of its own intelligence services.
My noble friend Lord Paddick has put extremely well, and much better than I could, all the objections of principle. The storage of everyone’s web browsing for 12 months, even if it is only up to the first forward-slash, would blur the boundary between communications data and content. It could reveal an awful lot about people’s health, sexual characteristics, political views, marital problems and other potentially embarrassing personal information. This is simply too much power to give to the state. Yes, 12 months’ storage of everyone’s web browsing history is an objection of principle.
I also stress the practical difficulties of scooping up third-party data and setting up a transatlantic jurisdiction on a war which we are destined to lose. From my time as a Member of the European Parliament in the last few years, I have some experience of this in the wake of the Snowden revelations and the whole impact that had on the attempt to get data sharing across the Atlantic without the framework of a transatlantic data-protection agreement. The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, who is not in his place, will remember those debates. We need to work co-operatively with US-based companies rather than try to overreach ourselves in terms of jurisdiction. I fear that the reaction to that, which already has happened in the last few years, is that it could lead to fragmentation and balkanisation of the internet. The glory of the internet is that it is global. We in the West look askance at what is happening in China and Russia in trying to cut themselves off from the global internet. I foresee that that could happen transatlantically as well. Companies in the United States are under a great deal of pressure to comply with at least the safeguard provisions of US law, partly as a result of the lively public debate there in the last 18 months, which is unlike in this country where there has not been so intense a public debate. Of course, we know that they are going faster and faster down the route of encryption, with all the problems that my noble friend Lord Paddick mentioned.
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One of the few changes between last week and this week in the amendments proposed is the removal of the filtering arrangements. Last week, I said that I was afraid that the filter could increase the risk of phishing expeditions but the reply is that, equally, it might protect against unnecessary intrusions. I am not necessarily reassured by the removal of the filtering requirement. The requirement to retain weblogs would increase the size of the haystack by a huge factor. Some estimates say that it would be by a factor of 1 million, which will not make finding the needle any easier. Intelligence agencies already face challenges in making use of the data that they have.
There is a huge risk to privacy in the storage of such massive volumes of data. We have had numerous examples of data breaches. Who needs reminding—but I will—of the 25 million child benefit records lost by HMRC, while eBay had its database of 233 million customers hacked? Mention has been made of Edward Snowden. Of all people, the CIA had a database which was vulnerable to, some would say, whistleblowing, and, some would say, theft by Edward Snowden. City banks have had their systems hacked. Surely, the kind of database and the volume being talked about here
would be a hackers’ honeypot. Compared to what risks such a database would present, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Without being discourteous, signing up to amendments which some of the sponsors say that they would not vote for and floating a proposition only so that it can be discussed at the other end seems quite a peculiar way to legislate. I would have thought it more sensible to legislate on the basis of clauses that it is accepted represent some reasonable, coherent scheme. This certainly does not.
Finally, I say to my noble friend Lord Carlisle that I do not believe that there is agreement on the extent of the capability gap in government. My noble friend Lord Blencathra, who, once again, has given a most impressive speech, said that it did not get any cogent explanation from officials. My understanding is that there still is not an agreement, so we do not even know the target that it is proposed to hit. Until there is such an agreement, essentially that is delaying any sensible proposal on communications data.