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Passenger Name Records: EUC Report

My Lords, I should have put my name down to speak and I am sorry that I did not. Briefly, first, I want to make it clear that I support fully all efforts to catch criminals, especially terrorists, so my objective here is not about that. However, we must not lose sight of the dangers that may sometimes be contained within well meaning measures. In the real world, an EU directive does not protect you if there is a failure in the implementation of security measures, electronic or physical. That is the bottom line. We have a database being built up here of sensitive information. You can easily have unintended connections made, as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said, such as guilt by association. What happens if, by chance, you travelled a few times and coincidence came into effect and someone who might have the wrong associations travelled on a seat not far away from you? The next danger is with the credit cards. Criminals use stolen credit card details; it could be yours on someone else’s ticket. The actions with these data are therefore dangerous. There is also a danger to you. Critical financial information is kept in here, not just the billing address but your credit card details. It has everything you need to get someone’s credit card details in order to commit a fraud. If you used a debit card, they can empty your bank account so these data have to be kept extremely securely— at least to a standard such as the PCI-DSS, I hope, if not higher. Another question is: who will have access to this information abroad and in the future? Will it be in European countries or worldwide? I can think of certain foreign countries which I would not like to have my information under any circumstances whatever. I can think of a couple of European countries where I would not be too happy with that, particularly considering things such as the European arrest warrant and the way that different crimes are created to have a different sense of gravity in different countries. The data are supposed to be retained for serious crimes, but what is a serious crime? Look at the mission creep that was behind RIPA and where we ended up with that. We have to start worrying about this. We all treat crimes in different ways, and this measure will soon creep elsewhere. The bottom line is that if we were worried by the national identity register, why on earth are we not worried about this? This contains almost more information about you. There is a huge privacy issue here about the state looking at who you are travelling with, when and in what circumstances. Should it be snooping into some people’s private lives in that way? I have nothing to fear on that score, which is why I can stand up and say that, but some people would be very uncomfortable if they knew that conclusions were being made that could be brought up to silence them if things got awkward, particularly if foreign Governments had access to those data. I can see huge dangers here. There is also the question of business intelligence for foreign purposes. We should tread much more cautiously. You can write what you like on a bit of paper, but it is not worth anything in the real world.