A parliamentary committee is to hear evidence from the public as well as from listening centres in the UK and America, and the media, as part of the widening of its inquiry into UK spy agencies’ intercept activities.
The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, is examining whether laws governing state interception are “still fit for purpose”, as well considering the impact they have on people’s privacy.
It is unusual for a committee to involve the public in such inquiries but one Whitehall source has described this particular investigation as a “public inquiry in all but name”.
Sir Malcolm has conceded that public concerns need to be addressed and said that there is a balance to be found between an individual’s right to privacy and the country’s collective right to security.
The ISC has been criticised recently as being too close to the security agencies it is supposed to be investigating and has been under pressure to provide more robust scrutiny of the intelligence community as a whole.
Members of the ISC, including Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, and Stella Rimington, a former head of MI5, have all raised concerns about the laws governing the secret services and the amount of scrutiny they are subjected to, which has led to the committee formally deciding to broaden its inquiry.
Concerns initially arose over “snooping” by the state after data-gathering centre GCHQ was cited in leaks to the Guardian newspaper by ex-US security contractor Edward Snowden and these eventually led to the ISC inquiry.
However, in July, after reviewing GCHQ reports produced with material including US intelligence from its controversial Prism programme, the ISC decided that UK security services had not broken the law in accessing information on UK citizens.