My Lords, I will speak also to Amendment 7, which is in my name. These amendments require a person granting an authorisation in urgent cases to notify a judicial commissioner within, at most, 24 hours. This amendment would make it mandatory that, when the intelligence services use type 7A and 7B data for urgent operational purposes, they must report this to a judicial commissioner within 24 hours.
As your Lordships know, the current proposal in the Bill is three days. As it stands, the intelligence services can use those three days to interrogate a dataset that is ultimately ruled offside by the judicial council—three days to deploy AI models that work very quickly, in moments. The Minister responded, highlighting extra cost as a possible reason not to pursue this. Plainly, with all due respect, that is not true, because the data has to be reported anyway, and bringing it forward by a couple of days is not a relevant concern.
The spectre of weekends has also been raised. I assume that, given that this process is to facilitate urgent investigations, the intelligence services themselves will be working on Saturday and Sunday, and it is up to them to report their activity. Amendments 1 and 7 do not change the time duty for the judiciary to respond, so this would not affect the operation of the urgent inquiry. Should they not respond until Monday or otherwise, it is not the concern of the services. Clearly, it puts pressure on the judicial commission to some extent, but the intelligence services will have met their side of the obligation and can carry on with their important and urgent work until such time as the judicial commissioner makes a ruling. In any case, I am sure
that there will be duty rosters and such things going on for this, so, again, I am not sure that the weekend is a concern.
Another argument that has been advanced and may yet return is that other legislation uses three days, so this should, too. The whole point of the Bill is to take advantage of new and innovative technology. It seeks to recognise the differences and change regulations accordingly. If the technology changes, as it does as a result of the Bill, so should reporting criteria. If there are other times that are different, perhaps we should be looking at those rather than at this amendment. In this case we are dealing with new technology, where artificial intelligence, once trained, can be deployed on data—which may or may not be allowed until such time as the judicial commissioner has ruled—and AI can produce its answers in minutes, perhaps hours.
In Committee I proposed that the use of this data for urgent operations should be reported immediately. I recognise that that was a very unreasonable suggestion, which is why these amendments specify within 24 hours, which is a fairer proposal.
In Committee, the Minister’s words on what happens to information retrospectively ruled unusable were helpful:
“The relevant information must be removed from the low/no dataset and either deleted or a Part 7 warrant sought”.—[Official Report, 11/12/23; col. 1743.]
However, additionally in Committee, various ex-services Peers confirmed what I knew, which is that once a fact is known by service personnel, it is not forgotten—it cannot be unknown. The noble Baroness, Lady Manningham- Buller, and other noble Lords were very clear on that.
This amendment is designed to limit the amount of unforgettable information that can be derived from inappropriate datasets. I will listen hard to the Minister’s words, but, unless he has found a different and more compelling argument than those already deployed, I will press Amendment 1.
I am pleased that the Government have agreed that, in the event of Amendment 1 being agreed, Amendment 7 will be treated as consequential. I beg to move.
3.45 pm