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Terrorism Bill

I support the new clause. I do so, subject to all the precautions that one would wrap around it to ensure that when there were concerns about the security of the state and the protection of methods, those arguments could be made and the evidence not used. The arguments against telephone taps used to be used against electronic eavesdropping—bugging. Now, in the courts, we regularly have transcripts of conversations in motor cars and inside people’s homes because a bug has been placed there to pick up those conversations. It can be very devastating evidence in some cases, including terrorism cases. When it comes to tapping telephones, it is different. A tap on a telephone on a landline follows pretty much the same sort of exemplar I mentioned with electronic eavesdropping in cars, for example, using the traditional bug. But we are talking about hoovering up conversations by satellite, and there is a resistance to making that kind of evidence available. I argue that that method is unreliable for the same reason. Sometimes it is not reliable because of the quality of the recording; sometimes conversations will take place in languages not familiar to those who are making a recording at a land station, picking up on the satellite waves; and the translations are not always very accurate. There are very good reasons for us calling into question the quality of some of that evidence. I can see good reasons for why it should not be seen as a reliable source of evidence, even as a source of intelligence. But if it is good, there must be occasions when the prosecution authorities say, ““This is evidence which we would be content to place before a court and we would be happy to have the appropriate witnesses called to support it without it giving away any of the great national secrets which concern people””. It is always a source of amusement to me that there are no secrets about how this is done. This kind of information is available to people. You may think you are privy to great secrets regarding the methods, but I can assure you that I have access to people who tell me exactly what the methods are. So it is a nonsense to think that it is a secret. In the panoply of methods to deal with terrorism, the state should be able to use this where appropriate and where it feels it would not be putting anybody or any particular method at risk. We can draft this provision in a way that would provide the sort of protections that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, has referred to under Clause 17.