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Internet: Personal Security (S&T Report)

My Lords, I welcome this debate, introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Broers, on the Science and Technology Committee’s original and follow-up reports on internet security and the Government’s responses to these reports. I, too, am disappointed by the generally unenthusiastic response of the Government to the initial report and I am concerned with their response to the follow-up report. I should say that I was not a member of the committee when the original report was produced. I share with other speakers concerns about the situation concerning bank fraud and where the responsibilities of the various parties lie. I wonder how many people have counted up how many passwords and the like they have. I did—it amounts to six PIN numbers, five passwords, two account access numbers, two security numbers and various other items. I suspect that this quantity is modest, compared with many people. But for the less able computer and card users, it is horrendous, and it is hardly surprising that people write them down or use family information and names for them and do not change them as frequently as they should. I know that I do not change them as frequently as I could because, if I do, I cannot remember them. Surely it must be possible to devise a better system than this. I am terrified at the possibilities of a key-stroke recorder residing on my computer and me being totally unaware of it. One hopes that one’s anti-virus software picks up things like that. I shall now raise the international perspective. In June, I attended as a representative of this House the IPAIT conference in Sofia—that is, the International Parliamentarians Association for Information Technology. This was the sixth such conference, earlier ones having been held in Seoul, Bangkok, Rabat, Brasilia and Helsinki last year, which I was also able to attend. The theme of this year's conference was information technology and ethics, which is relevant to this debate today. It was attended by about 120 people from 24 countries worldwide. There are 60 members of IPAIT. The UK is only an observer member. At the end of the conference, we issued a declaration of IPAIT's ethical aims for the future of information technology, and the internet in particular. The document is too long and verbose to read out now, but I will arrange for it and other supporting documents to be sent to members of both the Science and Technology and Information Committees, the latter committee having sponsored my attendance at the conference. I think these papers are well worth reading. The main proceedings unfortunately are in the form of four DVD discs of the televised process of the conference, and are not practical to distribute. The declaration from the conference contains some 13 individual clauses calling for internet regulation and standards of ethics; misuse of information, measures against cyberattacks—remember both Estonia and Korea have been subject to these, and of course Georgia was mentioned by an earlier speaker—protection of children; dissemination of ethical conduct for users; requirements for internet service providers to block illegal and harmful information, and require their full co-operation in the investigation of criminal internet activities; the safeguarding of civil rights; privacy and freedom of expression in all forms of communication; and so on. I appreciate that this goes somewhat wider than the reports we are discussing. The main thrust of all this was the need for international agreement on such ethical matters, and international participation in fighting e-crime because of the ““wild west”” nature of the internet, to quote the noble Lord, Lord Broers. The keynote speech was by academician Professor Kyril Boyanov of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. After reviewing the many benefits of information and communication technology, both to the economy of the nation and the individual citizen, he went on to discuss the benefits that technology could bring to the crisis in representative democracy occurring in many countries where we have very low turn-outs in elections. The benefits of e-voting and e-participation could go some way in providing the citizen with a more meaningful method of connecting with our democratic processes, and obviously are subject to the security issues we have already discussed. Noble Lords may think that this has little relevance to our debate on internet security, but if you consider e-voting via the internet in particular, as is already being used in Estonia, it becomes highly relevant. This subject was much discussed at the recent EPRI conference in Dublin. EPRI looks at ICT from a parliamentary point of view, looking out to the voter and enabling him to communicate with his MP and see and understand what Parliament is doing. Professor Boyanov pointed out that the internet is changing our lives, socially and commercially. The level of trust in the internet varies widely, ranging from 3 per cent in Brazil to 65 per cent in Korea. In the UK it is 44 per cent. Again, the level of accessibility by households varies widely throughout the world, from a high of 95 per cent in Korea to 10 per cent in Mexico and Turkey. These are figures for 2006. With all these benefits comes the downside—the easy and widely spreading use of malicious information, co-ordination of criminal activities and unauthorised access to information, all helped by inadequate legislation on internet crime, both at national and international level. Professor Boyanov goes on to discuss the various types of security threats, of which noble Lords are all too well aware. In conclusion, I suggest that we need national and international agreements and co-operation in fighting cybercrime in all its forms if we are to maintain public confidence and safe use on the internet.