Full details of the Bill are here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-investigatory-powers-bill
Speaking at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, David Cameron said the draft bill was "one of the most important this House will discuss", adding: "We must help the police and security and intelligence services to keep us safe."
Opposition approach:
It is noteworthy
that Labour support the Bill. The shadow home secretary Andy Burnham backed the
draft bill, saying it was "neither a snooper's charter nor a plan for mass
surveillance".Former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said it was a "much improved model" of the legislation he blocked during the coalition government.
The threat to the UK:
The threat is clear. In the past twelve months alone six
significant terrorist plots have been disrupted here in the UK, as well as a
number of further plots overseas. The frequency and cost of cyber-attacks is
increasing, with 90% of large organisations suffering an information security
breach last year. And the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
estimate that there are 50,000 people in this country downloading indecent
images of children. The task of law enforcement and the security and intelligence agencies has become vastly more demanding in this digital age. It is right, therefore, that those who are charged with protecting us should have the powers they need to do so. But it is the role of Government and Parliament to ensure that there are limits to those powers.
It is not just a threat from terrorism that we face but also that from organised crime. There are today over 5,000 active organised crime groups operating in the UK, comprising over 40,000 individuals. They are engaged in people trafficking, drug smuggling, theft and robbery. The frequency and cost of cyber-attacks is increasing.
These threats are compounded by the fact that the way in which people choose to communicate has evolved. People are using a telephone less to communicate in the way that they once did and are instead increasingly using a variety of mobile devices to communicate with one another via the internet and to connect to the services they need to live their lives. The means available to organised criminals, terrorists and hostile foreign states to coordinate, inspire and – increasingly – to execute their crimes are therefore also evolving. Communications technologies that cross devices and international borders increasingly allow those who would do us harm the opportunity to evade detection.
This change of communication means that many of the long standing capabilities which have enabled law enforcement and the security and intelligence agencies to detect how serious criminals and terrorists are communicating are becoming less available. Data which was available for traditional forms of communications, such as telephony, is not always held for internet communications because CSPs do not retain all the relevant data for their business purposes (as they might billing data for a phone line).
The draft Bill will do three key things:
First it will
replace the existing statutory scheme with one that is comprehensive and
comprehensible. It will bring together all of the powers available to the state
to access communications. It will do so in a transparent way that leaves no
doubt about when and how public authorities acquire, store and access
information.Second, the Bill will ensure consistent, effective statutory safeguards and strengthen our already robust oversight regime. It will remove any doubt or ambiguity about the sufficiency and efficacy of checks and balances. And it will provide world leading oversight arrangements.
Third, the Bill will consolidate existing powers and, only where a strong operational case can be made, will enhance those powers in order to minimise capability gaps.
Our intention is that this Bill should last for many years, future proofing existing powers by ensuring they are clear, technology-neutral and fit for the long-term. It should be a world-leading piece of legislation in terms of transparency, oversight and strength of safeguards.
The wide-ranging draft Investigatory Powers Bill also contains proposals covering how the state can run operations to sweep up large amounts of data as it flows through the internet.
The draft bill's measures include:
Giving a panel
of judges the power to block spying operations authorised by the home secretary
Police will not
be able to access journalistic sources without the authorisation of a judge
A legal duty on
British companies to help law enforcement agencies hack devices to acquire
information if it is reasonably practical to do so
Former Appeal
Court judge Sir Stanley Burnton is appointed as the new interception of
communications commissioner
Mrs May told parliament that the draft bill was a "significant departure" from previous plans, dubbed the "snooper's charter" by critics, which were blocked by the Lib Dems, and will "provide some of the strongest protections and safeguards anywhere in the democratic world and an approach that sets new standards for openness, transparency and oversight".
This duty would include forcing firms to hold a schedule of which websites someone visits and the apps they connect to through computers, smartphones, tablets and other devices.
Police and other agencies would be then able to access these records in pursuit of criminals - but also seek to retrieve data in a wider range of inquiries, such as missing people.
Mrs May stressed that the authorities would not be able to access everyone's browsing history, just basic data, which was the "modern equivalent of an itemised phone bill".
If officers want to mount more intrusive spying operations, including accessing the content of emails, hacking into computers and tapping phones, they will still need a warrant from the home secretary or another senior minister - 2,700 such warrants were signed last year.
But the draft bill proposes giving a new panel of judges, known as the Investigatory Powers Commission, the ability to veto such requests.
The Bill will be subject to the usual parliamentary scrutiny in both Houses but I am strongly in support of it.
