My Lords, my name is attached to Amendment 203 in this group, along with those of the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones, Lord Strathcarron and Lord Moylan. I shall speak in general terms about the nature of the group, because it is most usefully addressed through the fundamental issues that arise. I sincerely thank the noble Lord, Lord Allan, for his careful and comprehensive introduction to the group, which gave us a strong foundation. I have crossed out large amounts of what I had written down and will try not to repeat, but rather pick up some points and angles that I think need to be raised.
As was alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, this debate and the range of these amendments shows that the Bill is currently extremely deficient and unclear in this area. It falls to this Committee to get some clarity and cut-through to see where we could end up and change where we are now.
I start by referring to a briefing, which I am sure many noble Lords have received, from a wide range of organisations, including Liberty, Big Brother Watch, the Open Rights Group, Article 19, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reset and Fair Vote. It is quite a range of organisations but very much in the human rights space, particularly the digital human rights space. The introduction of the briefing includes a sentence that gets to the heart of why many of us have received so many emails about this element of the Bill:
“None of us want to feel as though someone is looking over our shoulder when we are communicating”.
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I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, that many of our communications are scanned and this has an impact, but as the noble Lord,
Lord Allan, said, end-to-end encryption prevents this. There is an increasing public awareness and understanding about that, and a desire to get away from the big tech companies the public utilises and clearly wishes to continue to utilise. That is a general public view, and one of the points made in the briefing is that so many people have very good reason to desire to maintain their privacy and be able to express themselves freely. The briefing notes that LGBTQIA+ people, for example, may wish that individual communications remain private.
I want to focus mostly on the broader issue of people who are looking to use services for public good. Some 40 million people in the UK use private messaging services every day, but some of those are journalists and activists for democracy and human rights around the world who are potentially putting themselves, and those with whom they communicate, in danger from repressive regimes. We have the problem that, if we open up the encryption, it can then be used by all kinds of different actors. It is worth putting on the record that the National Union of Journalists—I declare my position as a former newspaper editor—has expressed grave concerns about the duties currently being put on breaking encryption. It notes that it places
“journalists, sources and whistle-blowers in danger, creating a chilling effect that prevents individuals providing information that could help inform public interest journalism, and hold the powerful to account”.
I regret that I cannot be in the Committee on the economic crime Bill running in parallel to this, where we are talking about some of these issues. On the last group in that Bill, we talked about the importance of the media and NGOs in exposing economic crime, and that is true of many other areas of our society.
The noble Lord, Lord Allan, stressed what we might see if organisations choose to withdraw from the UK rather than leave their services here, but I want to address the point about what could happen if the organisations remain here and allow the set-up of systems for client-side scanning, as this Bill appears to point towards. That would open up the tools to being available and we know from experience around the world that, once we have those tech approaches out there, they spread literally in the manner of a virus—both in the biological and technical sense. They are available then to a whole lot of actors whom we do not want to have them.
It is worth coming back to the overall view of this. Sometimes we say that the security services were always able to open letters and look at individual communications, when we hope they had the legal basis to do so. Here we are talking about everything, everybody, all the time, which is an entirely different world situation to that individual, targeted legal basis.