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Intelligence and Security Committee

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears). She speaks with compassion and conviction, and she articulates her points very well. She is an asset to the Committee, and it has also been a pleasure to work with her on other Committees. As the final Back-Bench speaker, I should consider what points are left to be made in what has been a very informative debate. It is important that the British public and Parliament have confidence in the agencies' ability to keep us safe, and to do so within the framework of the law and our democratic values. I therefore add my congratulations to the Committee and its Chairman on the work they do in helping to realise those objectives. The Committee has now been in existence for 16 years, since the Intelligence Services Act 1994, and it is clear that greater transparency has been introduced year after year. The security services have, of course, been in existence for much longer than that, but it is also clear that the public remain largely unaware of what they really do. It has been left to romanticised fictional characters, from James Bond to George Smiley, to portray the role of our clandestine services, apart from when information has occasionally spilled out into the public domain, such as the revelations about the Cambridge spies and the break-up of the Soviet spy ring in the 1970s. Indeed, so well are our secrets kept that it was not until the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) became Home Secretary that he discovered the existence of his own MI5 file dating back to his days as a student radical. That shows how well our clandestine services can keep secrets. Our modern-day service dates back to 1909, when it was called the Secret Service Bureau, but intelligence monitoring, collection and interception dates back far further—all the way back to the 15th century. Thomas Cromwell ran secret agents in Europe on behalf of Henry VIII and the famous Sir Francis Walsingham, private secretary to Elizabeth I, developed expertise in secret interception and maintained a network of more than 50 agents abroad. For the sake of completion, we must not forget the masters of intelligence gathering: those in the Whips Office. The party enforcers have long developed that dark art of intelligence gathering and monitoring, not to mention a range of creative punishments lest Members drift astray. On a serious note, we live in turbulent times and there has been a focus on our secret intelligence services since 9/11. More demands have been placed on them, as our nation expects them to prevent attacks by recognising where they are coming from and intervening before they get out of hand. As I mentioned in an intervention, I believe that after 9/11 too much unchecked power fell into those hands, and the very standards that successive generations fought hard to create, defend and preserve slipped. As the Chairman of the Committee rightly pointed out, there is no criticism of the British intelligence services or their methods of gathering intelligence. We should be more focused on how we use that intelligence, how it was portrayed by the politicians and the consequences of the actions taken after that. Given Guantanamo Bay, rendition, water-boarding, the justification for the Iraq war, dodgy dossiers and so on, hon. Members will recognise that in the so-called ““war on terror”” we lost our way. I am very pleased that the Chilcot inquiry has finally got off the ground and will report soon. It will provide testament to what went wrong during the justification for going to war. As a nation, we need to be an inspiring example of the values that we hold dear and that we must encourage others to stand up for. Once damaged, our moral authority in the eyes of the world is very difficult to replenish, so I am very pleased that this Government are overhauling how the security services do business, are held accountable and marshal their resources in a way that serves this country's overall objectives. Three themes have emerged today. The first is the importance of the strategic defence and security review in providing that strategic direction, which, sadly, was absent for so long under the previous Government. The second is that new guidance is in place so that the courts can be used more appropriately and the Justice and Security Green Paper aims to strengthen our legal arrangements involving cases that require Security Service comment. The third is, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) outlined passionately, the new era of openness and scrutiny that we now expect. I am pleased to see that powers will very much be coming to the Committee to allow it to continue that work. It seems strange that we can now talk about Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, Iain Lobban, the director of GCHQ, and Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5. In the past, those names would have been limited to a letter or would not have be known by us at all. In the remaining minutes, I wish to discuss cyber-security, which I mentioned in an intervention. As the report suggests, this is a completely new dimension, which we have yet to master. It is constantly evolving and is introducing a complexity to security matters that we have not been able to appreciate before. It is also fuelling an explosion of new connections between Governments, economies and citizens. The use of cyber-world is overwhelmingly positive, allowing the transfusion of ideas, thoughts, economies and so on, but it is also a double-edged sword—there is a negative aspect to it. Aspects of the Arab spring have been attributed to the way in which Facebook has been used to communicate in a way that had not been allowed in the past. That of course is very positive, but the internet has been harnessed by terrorists, criminals and, in some cases, states to disrupt and attack. The question I pose to the Minister, which my right hon. and learned Friend mentioned in relation to cyber-security, concerns the number of agencies that have taken an interest in cyber-security. I believe that my right hon. and learned Friend talked about there being 18 units in all. That of course is very positive, because it simply means that every agency, organisation and Department recognises the need to understand and become an expert in this realm. Are we at a point at which there is the co-ordination we require, as illustrated on page 56 of the report, which lists the number of organisations with cyber-security interests? I also mentioned in my intervention the changes in our society. The generation growing up today is living in a very different world from the one in which I grew up. The computer I first came to terms with was the ZX81, which would probably be found in an antiques store or even a museum now. I hear some chuckles from Opposition Members, and they probably recognise that name. Nowadays, everybody has a computer or has a mobile phone or iPad on their person. We are entering the digital world of the future—it is already the world of today. The liberal way in which youngsters today exchange information quite freely means that we need to ask whether, when they graduate to adulthood and become responsible for credit cards and information in small, medium and large businesses, they will have the same level of caution as we apply in using such technology. We are cautious because we are uncertain of it, because of the generation of which we are part. There is also a concern about whether small and medium-sized businesses will have the intuition to recognise the importance of cyber-security. There is a worry that the financial crisis will mean that the last thing on any small business's mind is the consideration of cyber-security and protecting their digital information. Of course, when we talk about cyber-security we have to remember that it is not just about terrorism but about criminality, too. The impact on our society of the internet and of the digital age is, I would argue, bigger than the invention of the wheel or more significant than the printing press, such is the effect on the world and our lives. If knowledge is power, the internet means power now has no boundaries. The ability to simplify our lives through online banking and shopping is positive, of course, but the internet can be terrifying because of the risk of identity theft or, indeed, sabotage, which could lead to disasters such as a head-on rail collision. If the Cabinet Office leads on cyber-security, we must then ask whether it—or another Department—should lead on educating businesses and the nation. If not, which Department should do that? It needs to be a priority for the reasons I have outlined. We have an opportunity now to harness such work to our economic benefit. We have an aerospace industry that is primed and ready to harness that capability. Can we now be the world leaders in providing protection in cyber-technology? Some of the recognised companies that we are dealing with, such as IBM and so on, are international operations—they are not British—but companies such as BAE Systems Detica and Logica are UK companies and when I spoke to them before the debate it was clear that they were concerned about university training. When we compare the university courses on cyber-technology, we see that only 15% of the content is consistent. That means that people are not sure and the universities are not in agreement about what needs to be taught in the future. There is an opportunity for leverage there. Finally, it is important to work with our allies, as the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles stressed. The Foreign Secretary said last week:"““Intelligence…is like a jigsaw…we…rarely have all the pieces””." The analysis of information and working with our partners enables us to piece together each snippet of information to create the fullest possible picture of the threats to our national security and to act against them. We cannot work in isolation on that; we must work with our allies, too. That means training our allies so that they can recognise and work to the same standards as we do, not just in the technology but in the moral standards I spoke about earlier. That allows us to develop links with parts of Governments in other countries and to build capacity and infrastructure support while strengthening our diplomatic and military relationships. In conclusion, our security services have the skills to assimilate information beyond the reach of everyday diplomacy, filling in the blanks in our understanding of our enemies. So much of their work is unseen and therefore receives little praise. They are our early warning system against those who plot to sabotage us, steal from us or kill us. It is difficult to find a country where the clandestine community performs so well under such scrutiny within the confines of democratic process. By and large, we sleep safe at night, oblivious to the many threats we face as they are dealt with by the service we never see.