MR JUSTICE BURTON
Approved Judgment
as “mass” or “bulk” surveillance. Mr Ryder made clear that he is not alleging
indiscriminate trawling, but rather “discriminate (in the sense that it is within very
broad selectors) but vast”. The Respondents describe their case in paragraphs 70 to
71 of their skeleton, that the only way to intercept external communications being
sent to, for example, an individual in Syria whose address they do not have is to:
“70 . . . intercept a substantially greater volume of
communications (including, potentially, a volume of internal
communications), and then apply a selection stage to identify
the communications in question. In other words, it is common
ground that the only practical way to find and reconstruct most
external communication “needles” is to look through the
communications “haystack”.
71. . . Unless the Claimants wish to submit that the Intelligence
Services should not be able to obtain the external
communications that are needed for the purposes of national
security, etc., they must accept some form of interception
regime that permits substantially more communications to be
intercepted (including, potentially, internal communications)
than are actually being sought.”
73.
Mr Ryder in his closing submissions made it absolutely clear that the Claimants did
not intend in any way to limit, hinder or obstruct the important work that the
Intelligence Services do. Their submissions, he made clear, were guided at putting
what the Services do within a framework and asking the Tribunal to do no more
than what Parliament wanted the Tribunal to do, namely to indicate to Government
when something is not in accordance with the law, in order to ensure that
Government action was done in the most effective way and in accordance with
proper legal principle.
74.
Under the heading “Restrictions on use of Intercepted Material etc” there are the
following two sections of RIPA, which in material part are as follows:
“15 (1) Subject to subsection (6), it shall be the duty of the
Secretary of State to ensure, in relation to all interception
warrants, that such arrangements are in force as he considers
necessary for securing—
(a) that the requirements of subsections (2) and (3) are
satisfied in relation to the intercepted material and any
related communications data; and
(b) in the case of warrants in relation to which there are
section 8(4) certificates, that the requirements of section 16
are also satisfied.
(2) The requirements of this subsection are satisfied in relation
to the intercepted material and any related communications
data if each of the following—