10.
INTELLIGENCE
Scope and sources
10.1.
This Chapter seeks to summarise what the security and intelligence agencies (MI5,
MI6 and GCHQ: referred to in this Chapter as the Agencies) - have submitted to me
about the future shape of the law. It is shorter than the previous Chapter because:
(a)
The Agencies, though certainly among the most important users of the relevant
powers, comprise only three of the approximately 600 bodies entitled to use
them.
(b)
Issues relating to the Agencies’ use of their powers were very recently explored,
to the extent deemed compatible with the requirements of national security, in
a full and careful report of the ISC.1
(c)
For the most part, the Agencies are concerned to preserve their current powers
rather than to acquire new ones.
Contact with the Agencies
10.2.
My work since 2011 as Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation has been
chiefly concerned with the activities of Ministers, civil servants, police and prosecutors,
and with the experience of those affected by the terrorism laws. Though I visit and
speak regularly to all three Agencies (in particular MI5) in the context of that work, I
have not in the past been exposed to the detail of their operations in the same way as
the Commissioners or indeed the ISC. But in the past six months, I have acquired a
degree of knowledge of the workings of the Agencies, and of their cultures, which is
highly unusual for any outsider.
10.3.
This Review confronted the Agencies with severe risks as well as opportunities.
Nevertheless, they have engaged with me in a manner which I have found to be both
open and constructive. Everything they said to the ISC, orally or in writing, was
disclosed to me without question or reservation. The details of extremely sensitive
capabilities have been volunteered to me, without any visible reticence. I addressed
a large number of questions to the Agencies, including questions to GCHQ arising out
of the Snowden Documents, and received full written answers which I was able to
probe orally. I have benefited from a number of thoughtful written submissions on
general and specific issues, from an intensive three-day visit to GCHQ in Cheltenham,
from a number of conversations with Agency officials in posts abroad, from interviews
with the chiefs of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and from a series of sometimes lengthy
meetings and demonstrations in London with each Agency.
10.4.
There is, as one would expect, a range of views within each Agency as to the degree
of public transparency that is appropriate. Organisations whose existence was an
official secret just a generation ago are still learning to come to terms with a world
which demands scrutiny, assurances and accountability at every turn. To an outsider,
1
ISC Privacy and Security Report: see in particular chapters 3-5 (interception) and 6 (communications
data).
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