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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Looking into the content of people’s e-mails and other internet traffic was in Part 1 of RIPA and is subject to very special provisions and protections: it is open to the security services and the police under warrant. Part 2 gave access to the header material—in other words, to who you were communicating with—to more people. That is what the Home Office proposed looking at under the intercept modernisation programme, and there has been a lot of outcry about that. There were never any proposals under IMP—the intercept modernisation programme—that the Home Office, at an everyday level, should be allowed to look at the content of e-mails. There have been huge arguments about where the header stops and content starts. To start bypassing that in a Bill like this is hugely dangerous. This needs to be looked at in the context of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. This is exactly the sort of thing that a lot of people, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, worried about when the Phorm technology was used for targeted advertising. Even though it used anonymising technology, because it was looking at the content of the transmission it caused huge concerns about whether it was legal. It is quite possible that this may conflict with other laws, and we ought to worry about that. How does an ISP restrict access to these websites? Normally, if you are trying to restrict access to a website, it is not your ISP that would do it, but the host of the website. It is not necessarily an ISP, but is a web hosting service. It would be asked to take the website down or restrict access, or you could even have the registry take it off the domain name service in order to make sure that people did not get access to it. You would not normally try to get an individual ISP to restrict access to particular internet sites. It would be technically difficult to do. I am not sure that what the Government propose is well worded. They should pay attention to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.