The Investigatory Powers Bill
1.15.
This Review was conducted during the passage of the Bill, which was introduced
to Parliament after extensive pre-legislative scrutiny on 1 March 2016.
1.16.
The need for a comprehensive Bill to govern investigatory powers had been
identified in three studies published between March and July 2015. One of those
studies was my own “A Question of Trust” [AQOT], which I produced over a
period of nine months with the help of a different small team.16 The Bill, which on
arrival in the House of Lords extended to nine Parts, 243 clauses, 10 schedules
and 253 pages,17 seeks to give effect to my central recommendation that:
“A comprehensive and comprehensible new law should be drafted from
scratch, replacing the multitude of current powers and providing for clear
limits and safeguards on any intrusive powers that it may be necessary for the
public authorities to use.”18
1.17.
The impetus for those recommendations derived in part from the well-known
activities of Edward Snowden. I neither condone Edward Snowden’s actions nor
underestimate the damage that they have done, on which I have been briefed.
Nonetheless, the material taken by him through access to US National Security
Agency [NSA] systems, and the articles subsequently published in outlets
including the Guardian and the New York Times, have been the basis for
suggestions that in the UK as elsewhere, broad and obscure powers were being
exercised in a manner that few had understood. Litigation, fuelled by those
allegations, has persuaded the IPT to indicate that some powers have lacked the
necessary accessibility and foreseeability to comply with international human
rights standards. That in turn has driven the Government to accept, in the Bill
and its accompanying documents, that much greater transparency is needed.
One of the purposes of AQOT, and in particular my proposal for a powerful new
regulator, was to ensure that Parliament and the public are properly and
sufficiently informed, as democracy requires, about the powers being exercised
in their name.
16
17
18
AQOT is available from my website: https://terrorismlegislationreviewer.independent.gov.uk/.
The other two studies were a report of March 2015 by the Intelligence and Security Committee
of Parliament [ISC] entitled “Privacy and Security” [2015 ISC report], which in accordance with
the remit of the ISC dealt only with the powers of the SIAs, and a Royal United Services
Institute report of July 2015 “A Democratic Licence to Operate” [RUSI report]. The RUSI panel
was a wide-ranging one and included former heads of each SIA: but unlike the ISC and my own
review, it had only limited access to classified material.
This is the version of the Bill to which I refer throughout this report: see fn 1 above.
AQOT, Executive Summary, para 10; cf. Home Secretary’s Foreword to Draft Investigatory
Powers Bill, 4 November 2015.
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