I thank the Minister for giving way. I think this is the first time I have heard the Government admit that the phrase “removal of electronic protection” does in fact refer to encryption.
I want to emphasise—and anybody in the cryptography industry will spell this out—that you cannot have it both ways. Either encryption is secure, or it is not; it cannot be insecure for a small group of users and secure for everybody else. Once encryption is weakened,
it is weakened for everyone and once this is done at the request of the Government, it is available to all the people I listed earlier who would do us harm. I would also point out that there are a myriad of encryption products available outside the UK—ISIS has its own set, and I have seen the manual. There are any number of ways that people who want to use encryption for malign purposes can acquire it and use it in a way that UK companies cannot break.
Lastly, when I was at GCHQ, it seemed fairly relaxed about the threat of encryption because it is very confident that it can use the other means we have referred to, such as equipment interference, to get the unencrypted data it wants. But the main point, which the Government really do have to take on board, is that encryption is either strong or it is not. It cannot be partially strong—that is, strong for most and weak for the Government.