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Newspapers: Surveillance Methods

My Lords, the Minister has long been a doughty defender of the liberties of the individual in this country. I thank him for repeating the Statement and for his further comments. However, I wish to take the matter a little further. He pointed out that there is a low level of awareness of the significantly more sophisticated methods now being employed by people in terms of data breaching and breaking into telephone and other communications systems. This is occurring on a scale that we certainly did not see a decade ago. As the Minister well knows, there is an increasing tendency for people to hack into security systems. Only yesterday there was a major hacking incident at the Pentagon and other US government agencies which have the most tightly secured databases. This suggests that we shall have to deal with this factor for a long time to come. A crucial aspect is that it cannot be dealt with simply on the basis of taking administrative decisions about tightening up data systems. At the end of the day a clear criminal sanction must be imposed by the courts to stop people committing these crimes. Like many others in this House, I did much work in eastern Europe in the 1990s. I was most conscious of the astonishing way in which the Stasi in East Germany had used data that had been leaked to it—in some cases people had been compelled to give it—in order to blackmail and put pressure on people who were attempting to uphold the principles of democracy. At one point something like one in every 70 East Germans were recruited by the Stasi to spy on others or to get hold of sensitive, private data. I do not wish to delay the House but I trust that we will take this matter very seriously. Extremely troubling allegations have been made in the Guardian and elsewhere in the past day or so. Given that there is likely to be no further opportunity for a Statement before the House rises at the end of this month, will the Government make clear what steps they and other institutions such as Parliament propose to take. This is my final point, because I do not want to delay the House. What emerges so clearly from the information that we have received is the almost total failure of the institutions that we set up, particularly to protect the privacy of individuals and the security of data, to take this issue seriously. Those institutions include the Press Council, which should be ashamed of its failure to investigate some of the allegations that were made to it, and, sadly, our own media committees in another place, which do not seem to have taken these matters as seriously as they should have. Will the Minister agree to put some letter or statement in the Library to enable us to see what the Government intend to do about these very serious issues?