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Newspapers: Surveillance Methods

My Lords, I can assure the noble Baroness that we take this very seriously. The reason why I am not giving a knee-jerk initial reaction to everything is that I take the issue so seriously. We need to look at the full implications of all of this across the board and then think about how we should act. My right honourable friend Mr David Hanson in the other place gave an undertaking that he would report back following these considerations and presumably I will repeat a Statement here as a result of that. I imagine that that probably will not be before Parliament rises, but I do not know. If it is, clearly I will; if not, my right honourable friend has given an undertaking and it will happen. As regards clear criminal responsibility, there are already certain criminal punishments for some aspects of these things. The noble Baroness is right to say that we perhaps need to look at this more broadly. Interestingly in the cybersecurity package that I have put in place, we will have people in CSOC looking at ethics and possible legislation, should that be considered necessary. The noble Baroness is absolutely right to say that people do not understand this; they do not understand their vulnerability. Even cards for various stores and so on give away a great deal of data about people. People do not think about or understand what they are doing sometimes when they provide data in that way. The American situation is far worse, as I have said previously on the Floor of the House. The Americans are spending some $17 billion to try to get their systems in order. Part of the problem is that they were in this game well before us, so their computer systems were set up earlier and they have a huge number of portals—more than 8,000—into their government systems, which means that, actually, it is not that difficult to hack into them. That is why President Obama is intent on doing something. We are better placed, but—my goodness—we are not complacent. Our gsi.gov.uk is much tighter and much better controlled and gives us a lot of protection, but we are by no means complacent. These are all very important issues, which we need to take ahead.