David Blunkett calls for urgent review of laws governing security services

Former home secretary urges update of safeguards over spy agencies, saying 'we have to protect ourselves from ourselves'

Nick Hopkins and Matthew Taylor

Britain's intelligence laws need to be urgently reviewed to keep up with new technologies and provide a stronger framework for spy agencies, which can "get carried away" unless they are kept in check, the former Labour home secretary David Blunkett has said.

Calling for a commission to address the issue, Blunkett said governments were put under enormous pressure by the secret services – and he had learned to treat some of their demands with healthy scepticism. In an interview with the Guardian, he said it was human nature for the agencies and the police to push the boundaries, and that meant laws could be used in a way parliament never intended.

"Human nature is you get carried away, so we have to protect ourselves from ourselves," he said. "In government you are pressed by the security agencies. They come to you with very good information and they say 'you need to do something'. So you do need the breath of scepticism, not cynicism, breathing on them. You need to be able to take a step back. If you don't have this, you can find yourself being propelled in a particular direction."

He said a high-level review by specialists with a proper understanding of the arguments was the best way to update laws that were out of touch.

Blunkett's remarks are particularly striking because he was regarded as a hardline home secretary and once described concerns about human rights as"airy-fairy". He was appointed home secretary months before 9/11 and tried to bring in new anti-terrorism measures, including the detention without trial of suspect foreign nationals who could not be extradited or deported.

He was also responsible for reviewing the early use of a key piece of anti-terror legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa),which has provided the legal underpinning for some of GCHQ's mass-surveillance programmes revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The Labour heavyweight now concedes that Ripa is a problem law that was introduced by his predecessor, Jack Straw, "to provide a framework for what was a free-for-all in a growing but little understood area". But Blunkett said the law's limitations were quickly exposed because technology moved so fast.

"We were moving into an entirely new era. We were at the very start of understanding what we were dealing with, and understanding the potential. You have to have constant vigilance and return to these issues on a regular basis because the world changes and you should be prepared to change with it. I think Ripa needs trimming back. It is being used for things for which it was never intended."

The Guardian has revealed that GCHQ relies on Ripa to provide the legal cover for programmes such as Tempora, which taps undersea cables that carry internet traffic in and out of the country. on Monday Diana Johnson, the shadow crime and security minister, wrote to the Home Office minister James Brokenshire to demand the "explicit legal basis" under which the Tempora programme operates.

Yesterday Privacy International filed complaints with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) against some of the world's leading telecommunication companies for providing assistance to GCHQ's Tempora programme. The group believes up to a dozen OECD guidelines, relating to companies' responsibilities to respect human rights, including the right to privacy and freedom of expression, may have been violated.

The intelligence and security committee, which scrutinises Britain's secret services, has now launched a review of Ripa, and on Thursday it will question the heads of the three spy agencies in an unprecedented open session.

Though David Cameron and the head of MI5, Andrew Parker, have defended the current intelligence laws, critics insist that they are hopelessly outdated and open to abuse. Blunkett said it was high time for the government to launch "a high-level review or a commission" to address the problems, though not one chaired by a judge.

"I don't like prolonged, highly expensive commissions, especially if they are chaired by judges. We seem to have overwhelming faith in judges.

"We need a process of finding common ground and a solution. You need people with some knowledge and expertise. In politics we tend to fight the last election, not the next. You need to be able to see the bigger picture," he said.

Blunkett said it was important to do this quickly to avert more poisonous arguments in the future. "We need to do so before rather than after a catastrophe so we can try to update in the light of day rather than with a shouting match. We should seek to retain things only if they have some usable purpose. Collecting and maintaining data that you can never use is a futile exercise that causes distress without results.

"The present coalition came into power with a remit to try to scale back the operation of the state, but it has struggled just as badly as the previous government. I think this indicates the enormity of the issue and how difficult it is."

The intelligence agencies should welcome greater scrutiny, he said, or the public would lose confidence in them.

"If the climate is such that people are ultra-suspicious, not only does it make it difficult to have a sensible debate, but it also means that the very big players in the intelligence community don't want to co-operate. Once they don't want to co-operate then you are into having to force people to do things, and you get into much deeper water. So from the point of view of the security services it makes sense to have a greater degree of understanding and public support."

Blunkett said one of the central problems was how to protect British people from surveillance by "friendly" foreign agencies, such as GCHQ's US counterpart, the National Security Agency.

"We need to examine how we are going to provide British people with protections from friendly foreign agencies who want to surveil here," he said. "At the moment we aren't offering the same protections that they have from our domestic agencies, in terms of sign-off and warrants. We should try to work out what our stance is and we as a country haven't made any progress on that.

"We need to ensure we don't ask external agencies to do things to our own citizens that we wouldn't do ourselves. But we need to work out if they do want to surveil here and they want our co-operation, we have some mechanism for achieving it."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/david-blunkett-review-laws-security-services