:00:06. > :00:16.reviewed. -- that three convict did. Those are the headlines. Now it is
:00:16. > :00:20.
:00:20. > :00:24.time for HARDtalk. My guess today has been a candidate for the leader
:00:24. > :00:28.of the British Conservative party. He has also made a name for himself
:00:28. > :00:31.as a civil liberties campaigner, arguing against what is sometimes
:00:31. > :00:37.called as the surveillance state. What does he make of the massive
:00:37. > :00:44.collection of data by the NSA and also GCHQ, revealed by the American
:00:44. > :00:54.whistleblower, Edward Snowden. In the years since the 9/11 attacks,
:00:54. > :01:11.
:01:11. > :01:17.have we got the balance wrong between liberty and security?
:01:17. > :01:21.David Davis, welcome to HARDtalk. Were you surprised by the scale of
:01:21. > :01:28.the revelations by Edward Snowden, the piles and piles of stuff that
:01:28. > :01:34.was collected by the Americans and the British? Not really. I am
:01:34. > :01:40.surprised at the compliance of Google and Yahoo! . But I was not
:01:40. > :01:47.surprised by the fact that it goes on. When you recruit spooks, you
:01:47. > :01:50.recruit people who go to the age in what they see as national interest.
:01:50. > :01:57.Let's begin where you begin on this. There is nothing wrong with
:01:57. > :02:01.spying. Nothing wrong, as long as it is properly targeted. And there is
:02:01. > :02:04.nothing wrong with using the best technology, and if people are
:02:04. > :02:12.communicating by email and other means, that has to be looked at.
:02:12. > :02:20.Absolutely. The problem is in the law. What was done, it looks as
:02:20. > :02:26.though it was legal. Certainly under American law. Because they treat
:02:26. > :02:30.American citizens very different to everybody else. You and I might as
:02:30. > :02:36.well be in North Korea is as far as American law is concerned. That is
:02:36. > :02:42.not surprising in that respect. The other aspect is British law. GCHQ,
:02:42. > :02:47.appears to have said, to the Americans, the opposite of what they
:02:47. > :02:52.have been saying to parliamentary committees. They say that British
:02:52. > :02:56.surveillance is very light touch. It is very un- risk of deep will stop
:02:56. > :03:03.that is very important. They had exploited the law to its limits,
:03:03. > :03:11.what we are now discovering is what it means for ordinary citizens.
:03:11. > :03:16.is the government Communications headquarters. But prison and
:03:16. > :03:21.tempura, the codenames for these operations, helped prevent more than
:03:21. > :03:26.50 potential terrorist attacks. It is a narrow system directed at us
:03:26. > :03:30.being able to protect our people, all of it is done under the
:03:30. > :03:36.oversight of the courts. He says it is within the law and we have saved
:03:36. > :03:46.-- safeguards. They are talking about American citizens, not you and
:03:46. > :03:48.
:03:48. > :03:53.me. But there is also the standard deception. That this gathering,
:03:53. > :04:03.let's say, of 300 million pieces of information, has helped to stop
:04:03. > :04:10.these five, ten, 50 crimes. But you can stop those 50 crimes by a much
:04:10. > :04:15.more narrow investigation. For example, not impinging on our
:04:15. > :04:22.progressive. They have gone in this really crude way of sweeping
:04:22. > :04:27.everything up and it does not deliver the best security. Coming on
:04:27. > :04:31.to Britain, the Foreign Secretary, he has also been very clear. He says
:04:32. > :04:34.that if you are a law-abiding citizen you have nothing to fear
:04:34. > :04:41.about intelligence agencies listening to the of your phone
:04:41. > :04:46.calls. Tell that to Doreen Lawrence. The mother of Stephen Lawrence, the
:04:46. > :04:50.young man who was murdered, there was a very aborted police enquiry,
:04:50. > :05:00.at one stage they started to look on whether they could get dirt on her.
:05:00. > :05:05.It is not the only example. Americans, you had Clinton holding
:05:05. > :05:08.FBI files. Governments, even democratic governments, or their
:05:08. > :05:14.bureaucracies, they misuse power was if they are allowed to.
:05:14. > :05:22.You may be out of tight on which British citizens feel about it. If
:05:22. > :05:29.you are asked to balance security and privacy, nine -- 42% put
:05:29. > :05:35.security ahead of privacy. Forgive me, it is a dumb question. We prefer
:05:35. > :05:39.it to be secure. They do if it thinks it applies to them. Most
:05:39. > :05:46.people think they do not apply to me, my emails are not being looked
:05:46. > :05:51.at or whatever. There are through -- two deceptions in the question.
:05:51. > :05:56.Number one is that there is a trade-off. Remember what happened in
:05:56. > :06:03.the 7th of July, with the attack and 50 people being killed. Horrible
:06:03. > :06:06.crime. Those criminals, to arrest as -- terror arrests if you want to
:06:06. > :06:12.call them that, they were known to MI5 and the police, they rebel
:06:12. > :06:17.recorded plotting actions against the state, they had their addresses
:06:17. > :06:22.but they did nothing about it. Why, because they had so much information
:06:22. > :06:26.they could not deal with it. What we are doing is creating vast
:06:26. > :06:33.quantities of information, most of what is incredibly useless, but puts
:06:33. > :06:38.our privacy at risk. But you do axe at what President Obama is saying,
:06:38. > :06:43.that this does save lives. -- except. It could he done more
:06:43. > :06:49.effectively. It could be done better with less. This is using a shotgun
:06:49. > :06:53.when a rifle could do. This is not focusing sufficiently on the people
:06:53. > :06:59.who should be targeted very closely, and using a great Hoover to pull up
:06:59. > :07:06.everything. You have said since 9/11 and 77 lakh, that we have lost a
:07:06. > :07:11.sense of balance. Presumably before we did it with different technology.
:07:11. > :07:16.Even 9/11, most of us have not read the commission report, which led to
:07:16. > :07:23.the departure of the head of the CIA. One, because they were not
:07:23. > :07:27.using the information at hand. The people involved, some of them
:07:27. > :07:32.involved in the 9/11 planning, they were in the United States and known
:07:32. > :07:35.to the CIA and nothing was done to it. Warnings were ignored. The issue
:07:35. > :07:43.is focusing and using the information that you have got, not
:07:43. > :07:47.going out to harvest everyone. I have no objection, if you are a
:07:48. > :07:54.spook, and you think there is a real cause for investigating somebody,
:07:54. > :07:58.getting a judge, or a magistrate, to say, yes, you can do that, go and do
:07:58. > :08:06.it. I have an objection of being able to do it willy-nilly with any
:08:06. > :08:11.citizen. But you do not look for a needle in the haystack by making a
:08:11. > :08:14.bigger haystack. That is your argument. But to focus on the
:08:14. > :08:18.legality of it, it you are very clear that we are foreigners under
:08:18. > :08:22.US law, but foreign hack -- William Hague says that intelligence
:08:22. > :08:32.gathering here is governed by a strong legal framework. You except
:08:32. > :08:39.that? I do not. One element that we know about, that we were told about,
:08:39. > :08:45.is that whole blocks of information, from British residents,
:08:45. > :08:48.and citizens when they go abroad, that would include me if I email you
:08:48. > :08:54.via Google. Whole blocks of that data are made available to the
:08:54. > :09:00.Americans on an unlisted did bases. They do not check to see if we are
:09:00. > :09:04.terrorist, they just take everything. That can be done legal
:09:04. > :09:08.-- legally under an authorisation from the Secretary of State. But I
:09:08. > :09:15.was involved in writing those laws, I was a minister that took the bill
:09:15. > :09:25.through the House of Commons. The MI6 bill. We did not countenance
:09:25. > :09:30.this when I -- we created these options. We were talking at about
:09:30. > :09:40.bugging, not the skewed sweeps of data. It is not loophole, that it is
:09:40. > :09:41.
:09:41. > :09:45.a tunnel right through the law. One controversial example. I as a member
:09:45. > :09:48.of Parliament cannot have my communications intercepted, phone or
:09:48. > :09:55.anything else, without the explicit approval of the Prime Minister. But
:09:55. > :10:01.that goes right around it. You say it is a tunnel that goes through the
:10:01. > :10:07.law. The Foreign Secretary disagrees with you. He says it is authorised,
:10:07. > :10:10.it necessary, proportionate and targeted. It is not just him. The
:10:10. > :10:20.Minister under the Labour government says it is fanciful to think that
:10:20. > :10:23.GCHQ are working at ways of circumventing our laws. They do not
:10:23. > :10:28.need to circumvent our laws. The problem is that the laws are too
:10:28. > :10:32.weak. William Hague was right about one thing, it is legal.
:10:32. > :10:40.Proportionate, I do not think so. Not the entire Internet traffic
:10:40. > :10:44.going through this country. about necessary? Not necessary,
:10:44. > :10:51.because there are better ways of doing it. We come back to focusing
:10:51. > :10:59.on the actual targets. Most of what they do, what is done by the NSA,
:10:59. > :11:04.they are finding communications to a known terrorist any rock, and in a
:11:04. > :11:11.western country, and tracking from that radiating network. That sort of
:11:11. > :11:15.thing is very if it did. I do not mind if they have access to the
:11:15. > :11:21.entire traffic if they are carrying that out, if it is a properly
:11:21. > :11:30.controlled exercise. It is far more manpower effective and it works
:11:30. > :11:35.nearly all the time. What we did any right to eradicate Al-Qaeda. What
:11:35. > :11:40.would you do? Would you redraw the law to make it sharper, you are also
:11:40. > :11:47.telling people to look at smaller haystacks. The French, they do
:11:47. > :11:51.60,000 intercepts per year of the sort that we are talking about. They
:11:51. > :11:56.are targeted on my whole series of people that they think are high
:11:57. > :12:00.risk. Not terror arrest, but high risk people. That is under a
:12:00. > :12:06.magistrate's view. The Germans, they have a system which is incredibly
:12:06. > :12:12.fierce in terms of risk in people. But I do not notice any of those
:12:12. > :12:17.having a worse terrorist problem than we do. You are also known as
:12:17. > :12:23.the greatest -- not the greatest person in favour of the European
:12:23. > :12:31.Union so I am smiling at this. That in terms of the French and Germans
:12:31. > :12:35.doing their snooping, do they do it better than us? I think they do.
:12:35. > :12:39.Broadly speaking, in terms of domestic, control of domestic
:12:39. > :12:44.surveillance, I think both of them do that better than us. They are
:12:45. > :12:50.both major countries. These are not hillbillies, we are talking about
:12:50. > :12:55.real major countries. Can I make one point which is different between us
:12:55. > :12:59.and Germany and France, and may explain part of the difference. When
:12:59. > :13:07.we were at the end of empire, post-1945, allies with the
:13:07. > :13:16.Americans, we had a trade which was world-famous. The predecessor of
:13:16. > :13:20.GCHQ. It was a more salient player than GCHQ. When we went on from
:13:20. > :13:28.there, we had a number chip in the game when dealing with the American
:13:28. > :13:34.NSA. We had big listening posts in Hong Kong and Cyprus, which gave us
:13:34. > :13:38.a lot of traffic that the Americans could not get at. That was very
:13:38. > :13:46.important to us in maintaining the intelligence relationship will stop
:13:46. > :13:50.it is the closest in the world between Britain and America. Now,
:13:50. > :13:54.what this may be, it is like a similar sort of chip in the game,
:13:54. > :13:58.allowing the Americans to Hoover through what is this huge amount of
:13:58. > :14:05.Internet traffic, maybe our chip. The replacement for Hong Kong and
:14:05. > :14:10.Cyprus. In terms of Edward Snowden himself, do you see him as a
:14:10. > :14:13.traitor, which many people in the US appeared to do, or do you see him as
:14:13. > :14:19.somebody who has alerted us to the great danger to our civil liberties
:14:19. > :14:23.and should he be offered political asylum? I do not see him as a
:14:23. > :14:27.traitor. The Americans get three heavy-handed about these things. I
:14:27. > :14:31.do see him as a whistleblower that there is no doubt that he has broken
:14:31. > :14:36.the law and the contracts that he has taken when he went to work with
:14:36. > :14:40.those agencies. If he was a British citizen, I think he should face some
:14:40. > :14:48.kind of recourse, that it should be offset by the public interest.
:14:48. > :14:53.the big pit, there is no such thing as privacy? It is not the states, it
:14:53. > :14:58.is the supermarkets. They can find out what you are doing. CCTV.
:14:58. > :15:08.Journalists who can bug your phone. But there has been a scandal about
:15:08. > :15:18.
:15:18. > :15:28.we find out about this. Somewhat has been in the news recently. A member
:15:28. > :15:29.
:15:29. > :15:32.been in the news to irregularity. Why did he go into such a big fight
:15:32. > :15:37.with the press? Because he believed that they intrude on his privacy,
:15:37. > :15:45.and that broke his family. That is just one example. I could give you
:15:45. > :15:50.others. Examples of the miss use, and this is not just the state. Big
:15:50. > :15:56.corporations and bureaucracies tend to ignore the rules that they think
:15:56. > :16:00.should not impinge on them. There is real harm done. I was interested in
:16:00. > :16:04.what you said about Germany and France. Some of the things you said
:16:04. > :16:10.having a code very strongly by the Europeans, because they have been
:16:10. > :16:17.bogged by the Americans. I will never say this again on your
:16:17. > :16:24.programme and I haven't before, but I think this might be one place or
:16:24. > :16:28.the European Union is the answer. We could, but historically we have not
:16:28. > :16:32.been -- we have been placid in this area with the Americans. It is not
:16:32. > :16:36.in our nature. I think the Europeans will actually be cross enough to
:16:36. > :16:41.say, I'm sorry, but you have to think about more about people who
:16:41. > :16:47.are not citizens of the US. Citizens in the US have absolute privacy
:16:47. > :16:51.rights, but nobody else does. think the European Union might end
:16:51. > :16:57.up reflecting our privacy better than we are doing at the moment?
:16:57. > :17:03.Well, it could hardly be less. viewers around the world who don't
:17:03. > :17:08.know your track record on the EU, that is an extraordinary statement.
:17:08. > :17:12.Yes, someone is sitting there in shock. Civil liberties campaigners
:17:13. > :17:17.in this country who you have worked with on other matters believe that
:17:17. > :17:26.their information might have been unlawfully accessed by GCHQ and
:17:26. > :17:36.their security services. Under Article eight of the Human Rights
:17:36. > :17:41.
:17:41. > :17:51.Act, the right to privacy cock. -- privacy, which despite the fact that
:17:51. > :17:59.you have been against the Human Rights Act you might agree with.
:17:59. > :18:06.There are some parts of the Right -- Human Rights Act that I do not agree
:18:06. > :18:12.with. But this, yes. My name might come up on the American list, I have
:18:12. > :18:19.disagreed with things they said. And that's all information is handed
:18:19. > :18:23.over to them every day. Theresa May has said that we must also
:18:23. > :18:32.reconsider our relationship with the European Court, and that withdrawal
:18:32. > :18:36.should remain on the table. I am not with her on that. There may well be
:18:36. > :18:39.something to talk about there, but the problem here is quite simple.
:18:39. > :18:49.The original convention which we signed in the early 50s was quite
:18:49. > :18:51.
:18:51. > :18:54.tightly drawn, and the court has gone beyond it. It has a doctrine
:18:54. > :18:59.called the living instrument doctrine, which means they
:18:59. > :19:04.interpreted in the light of everyday life. As we speak, they have come
:19:04. > :19:08.out and suggested that we might no longer send people to prison for
:19:08. > :19:14.their entire lives, that we might hold open the option of letting them
:19:14. > :19:18.out. That sort of thing is way beyond their remit. It is beyond
:19:19. > :19:22.what was intended by this the founders of the European Convention.
:19:22. > :19:29.We should pull it back to the original aim, which was to stop
:19:29. > :19:35.torture, murder, crimes by the state and improper imprisonment. Those
:19:35. > :19:39.with a big things. So absolutely understand this, you do not think we
:19:39. > :19:43.should withdraw from the Convention on human rights, but you do think we
:19:43. > :19:53.back back to its roots. Perhaps just
:19:53. > :19:53.
:19:53. > :19:56.derogate little bits of it. Which remember off the top of my head the
:19:56. > :20:04.individual clauses, but some of the more about interpretation rather
:20:04. > :20:08.than the wording. But the bits I am concerned about are things like
:20:08. > :20:13.giving prisoners votes, that is our business. If we want to give them
:20:13. > :20:16.votes we can. That is for us to decide, not the Europeans. If we
:20:16. > :20:21.want to say somebody should go to prison forever because he is killed
:20:21. > :20:25.his entire family or a whole series of other pe?I ? of other pe we
:20:26. > :20:31.are talking about. We should be able say that it is not for the court to
:20:31. > :20:36.tell Parliament what to do about that. Let's bring us back to some
:20:36. > :20:41.domestic disclosures, particularly UKIP. You have been writing some
:20:41. > :20:44.interesting things about that, suggesting in effect that there is
:20:44. > :20:50.something to do with the relationship between David Cameron
:20:50. > :20:54.and ordinary people which is not working. Classes always
:20:54. > :21:03.characterised, but what is really about is people feeling that we are
:21:03. > :21:07.out of touch with them. It's not We are out of touch. There was a
:21:07. > :21:15.survey in the last few days which said that the majority of the party
:21:15. > :21:22.felt that we did not respect them. That is really serious. I think it
:21:22. > :21:29.party membership. That is one of the reasons UKIP have done very well in
:21:29. > :21:38.the last local elections. People were saying, I was at the polling
:21:38. > :21:44.station, and people were saying that they're going to vote for UKIP
:21:44. > :21:54.because of the language that we were using. Swivel eyed loons if I recall
:21:54. > :21:55.
:21:55. > :22:04.correctly. Is it puzzle you that there are so many inner circle of
:22:04. > :22:09.David Cameron. When I was in business, they used to be rules
:22:09. > :22:12.about individuals recruiting people just like himself. We all do it, I
:22:12. > :22:19.would be just as likely to recruit ex- working-class grammar
:22:19. > :22:22.schoolboys. I have said to him, look, I don't care if you are all
:22:22. > :22:32.Nobel Prize winners in physics. If you are all the same, it makes you
:22:32. > :22:33.
:22:33. > :22:37.blind in some areas. And voters see that labour is. What is UKIP? They
:22:37. > :22:47.are sort of a primary colours concern. It is a caricature of the
:22:47. > :22:56.
:22:56. > :22:59.80s that your party. It is no -- a nice simple message to get across.
:22:59. > :23:06.Maybe one of David Cameron is obvious answers to this is to
:23:06. > :23:16.promote someone with a working-class background, are they -- grammar
:23:16. > :23:17.
:23:17. > :23:21.schoolboy... I see what you are getting at. But that sort of person.
:23:21. > :23:27.There are plenty of people in our benches from a low background, very
:23:27. > :23:29.capable, then maybe he should think about. We do worry about the number
:23:29. > :23:34.of women and ethnic minorities. Perhaps we should worry about the
:23:34. > :23:42.number of people with the ordinary public would identify with. That is