David Davis - Conservative Member of Parliament, UK HARDtalk

reviewed. -- that three convict did. Those are the headlines. Now it is

time for HARDtalk. My guess today has been a candidate for the leader

of the British Conservative party. He has also made a name for himself

as a civil liberties campaigner, arguing against what is sometimes

called as the surveillance state. What does he make of the massive

collection of data by the NSA and also GCHQ, revealed by the American

whistleblower, Edward Snowden. In the years since the 9/11 attacks,

have we got the balance wrong between liberty and security?

David Davis, welcome to HARDtalk. Were you surprised by the scale of

the revelations by Edward Snowden, the piles and piles of stuff that

was collected by the Americans and the British? Not really. I am

surprised at the compliance of Google and Yahoo! . But I was not

surprised by the fact that it goes on. When you recruit spooks, you

recruit people who go to the age in what they see as national interest.

Let's begin where you begin on this. There is nothing wrong with

spying. Nothing wrong, as long as it is properly targeted. And there is

nothing wrong with using the best technology, and if people are

communicating by email and other means, that has to be looked at.

Absolutely. The problem is in the law. What was done, it looks as

though it was legal. Certainly under American law. Because they treat

American citizens very different to everybody else. You and I might as

well be in North Korea is as far as American law is concerned. That is

not surprising in that respect. The other aspect is British law. GCHQ,

appears to have said, to the Americans, the opposite of what they

have been saying to parliamentary committees. They say that British

surveillance is very light touch. It is very un- risk of deep will stop

that is very important. They had exploited the law to its limits,

what we are now discovering is what it means for ordinary citizens.

is the government Communications headquarters. But prison and

tempura, the codenames for these operations, helped prevent more than

50 potential terrorist attacks. It is a narrow system directed at us

being able to protect our people, all of it is done under the

oversight of the courts. He says it is within the law and we have saved

-- safeguards. They are talking about American citizens, not you and

me. But there is also the standard deception. That this gathering,

let's say, of 300 million pieces of information, has helped to stop

these five, ten, 50 crimes. But you can stop those 50 crimes by a much

more narrow investigation. For example, not impinging on our

progressive. They have gone in this really crude way of sweeping

everything up and it does not deliver the best security. Coming on

to Britain, the Foreign Secretary, he has also been very clear. He says

that if you are a law-abiding citizen you have nothing to fear

about intelligence agencies listening to the of your phone

calls. Tell that to Doreen Lawrence. The mother of Stephen Lawrence, the

young man who was murdered, there was a very aborted police enquiry,

at one stage they started to look on whether they could get dirt on her.

It is not the only example. Americans, you had Clinton holding

FBI files. Governments, even democratic governments, or their

bureaucracies, they misuse power was if they are allowed to.

You may be out of tight on which British citizens feel about it. If

you are asked to balance security and privacy, nine -- 42% put

security ahead of privacy. Forgive me, it is a dumb question. We prefer

it to be secure. They do if it thinks it applies to them. Most

people think they do not apply to me, my emails are not being looked

at or whatever. There are through -- two deceptions in the question.

Number one is that there is a trade-off. Remember what happened in

the 7th of July, with the attack and 50 people being killed. Horrible

crime. Those criminals, to arrest as -- terror arrests if you want to

call them that, they were known to MI5 and the police, they rebel

recorded plotting actions against the state, they had their addresses

but they did nothing about it. Why, because they had so much information

they could not deal with it. What we are doing is creating vast

quantities of information, most of what is incredibly useless, but puts

our privacy at risk. But you do axe at what President Obama is saying,

that this does save lives. -- except. It could he done more

effectively. It could be done better with less. This is using a shotgun

when a rifle could do. This is not focusing sufficiently on the people

who should be targeted very closely, and using a great Hoover to pull up

everything. You have said since 9/11 and 77 lakh, that we have lost a

sense of balance. Presumably before we did it with different technology.

Even 9/11, most of us have not read the commission report, which led to

the departure of the head of the CIA. One, because they were not

using the information at hand. The people involved, some of them

involved in the 9/11 planning, they were in the United States and known

to the CIA and nothing was done to it. Warnings were ignored. The issue

is focusing and using the information that you have got, not

going out to harvest everyone. I have no objection, if you are a

spook, and you think there is a real cause for investigating somebody,

getting a judge, or a magistrate, to say, yes, you can do that, go and do

it. I have an objection of being able to do it willy-nilly with any

citizen. But you do not look for a needle in the haystack by making a

bigger haystack. That is your argument. But to focus on the

legality of it, it you are very clear that we are foreigners under

US law, but foreign hack -- William Hague says that intelligence

gathering here is governed by a strong legal framework. You except

that? I do not. One element that we know about, that we were told about,

is that whole blocks of information, from British residents,

and citizens when they go abroad, that would include me if I email you

via Google. Whole blocks of that data are made available to the

Americans on an unlisted did bases. They do not check to see if we are

terrorist, they just take everything. That can be done legal

-- legally under an authorisation from the Secretary of State. But I

was involved in writing those laws, I was a minister that took the bill

through the House of Commons. The MI6 bill. We did not countenance

this when I -- we created these options. We were talking at about

bugging, not the skewed sweeps of data. It is not loophole, that it is

a tunnel right through the law. One controversial example. I as a member

of Parliament cannot have my communications intercepted, phone or

anything else, without the explicit approval of the Prime Minister. But

that goes right around it. You say it is a tunnel that goes through the

law. The Foreign Secretary disagrees with you. He says it is authorised,

it necessary, proportionate and targeted. It is not just him. The

Minister under the Labour government says it is fanciful to think that

GCHQ are working at ways of circumventing our laws. They do not

need to circumvent our laws. The problem is that the laws are too

weak. William Hague was right about one thing, it is legal.

Proportionate, I do not think so. Not the entire Internet traffic

going through this country. about necessary? Not necessary,

because there are better ways of doing it. We come back to focusing

on the actual targets. Most of what they do, what is done by the NSA,

they are finding communications to a known terrorist any rock, and in a

western country, and tracking from that radiating network. That sort of

thing is very if it did. I do not mind if they have access to the

entire traffic if they are carrying that out, if it is a properly

controlled exercise. It is far more manpower effective and it works

nearly all the time. What we did any right to eradicate Al-Qaeda. What

would you do? Would you redraw the law to make it sharper, you are also

telling people to look at smaller haystacks. The French, they do

60,000 intercepts per year of the sort that we are talking about. They

are targeted on my whole series of people that they think are high

risk. Not terror arrest, but high risk people. That is under a

magistrate's view. The Germans, they have a system which is incredibly

fierce in terms of risk in people. But I do not notice any of those

having a worse terrorist problem than we do. You are also known as

the greatest -- not the greatest person in favour of the European

Union so I am smiling at this. That in terms of the French and Germans

doing their snooping, do they do it better than us? I think they do.

Broadly speaking, in terms of domestic, control of domestic

surveillance, I think both of them do that better than us. They are

both major countries. These are not hillbillies, we are talking about

real major countries. Can I make one point which is different between us

and Germany and France, and may explain part of the difference. When

we were at the end of empire, post-1945, allies with the

Americans, we had a trade which was world-famous. The predecessor of

GCHQ. It was a more salient player than GCHQ. When we went on from

there, we had a number chip in the game when dealing with the American

NSA. We had big listening posts in Hong Kong and Cyprus, which gave us

a lot of traffic that the Americans could not get at. That was very

important to us in maintaining the intelligence relationship will stop

it is the closest in the world between Britain and America. Now,

what this may be, it is like a similar sort of chip in the game,

allowing the Americans to Hoover through what is this huge amount of

Internet traffic, maybe our chip. The replacement for Hong Kong and

Cyprus. In terms of Edward Snowden himself, do you see him as a

traitor, which many people in the US appeared to do, or do you see him as

somebody who has alerted us to the great danger to our civil liberties

and should he be offered political asylum? I do not see him as a

traitor. The Americans get three heavy-handed about these things. I

do see him as a whistleblower that there is no doubt that he has broken

the law and the contracts that he has taken when he went to work with

those agencies. If he was a British citizen, I think he should face some

kind of recourse, that it should be offset by the public interest.

the big pit, there is no such thing as privacy? It is not the states, it

is the supermarkets. They can find out what you are doing. CCTV.

Journalists who can bug your phone. But there has been a scandal about

we find out about this. Somewhat has been in the news recently. A member

been in the news to irregularity. Why did he go into such a big fight

with the press? Because he believed that they intrude on his privacy,

and that broke his family. That is just one example. I could give you

others. Examples of the miss use, and this is not just the state. Big

corporations and bureaucracies tend to ignore the rules that they think

should not impinge on them. There is real harm done. I was interested in

what you said about Germany and France. Some of the things you said

having a code very strongly by the Europeans, because they have been

bogged by the Americans. I will never say this again on your

programme and I haven't before, but I think this might be one place or

the European Union is the answer. We could, but historically we have not

been -- we have been placid in this area with the Americans. It is not

in our nature. I think the Europeans will actually be cross enough to

say, I'm sorry, but you have to think about more about people who

are not citizens of the US. Citizens in the US have absolute privacy

rights, but nobody else does. think the European Union might end

up reflecting our privacy better than we are doing at the moment?

Well, it could hardly be less. viewers around the world who don't

know your track record on the EU, that is an extraordinary statement.

Yes, someone is sitting there in shock. Civil liberties campaigners

in this country who you have worked with on other matters believe that

their information might have been unlawfully accessed by GCHQ and

their security services. Under Article eight of the Human Rights

Act, the right to privacy cock. -- privacy, which despite the fact that

you have been against the Human Rights Act you might agree with.

There are some parts of the Right -- Human Rights Act that I do not agree

with. But this, yes. My name might come up on the American list, I have

disagreed with things they said. And that's all information is handed

over to them every day. Theresa May has said that we must also

reconsider our relationship with the European Court, and that withdrawal

should remain on the table. I am not with her on that. There may well be

something to talk about there, but the problem here is quite simple.

The original convention which we signed in the early 50s was quite

tightly drawn, and the court has gone beyond it. It has a doctrine

called the living instrument doctrine, which means they

interpreted in the light of everyday life. As we speak, they have come

out and suggested that we might no longer send people to prison for

their entire lives, that we might hold open the option of letting them

out. That sort of thing is way beyond their remit. It is beyond

what was intended by this the founders of the European Convention.

We should pull it back to the original aim, which was to stop

torture, murder, crimes by the state and improper imprisonment. Those

with a big things. So absolutely understand this, you do not think we

should withdraw from the Convention on human rights, but you do think we

back back to its roots. Perhaps just

derogate little bits of it. Which remember off the top of my head the

individual clauses, but some of the more about interpretation rather

than the wording. But the bits I am concerned about are things like

giving prisoners votes, that is our business. If we want to give them

votes we can. That is for us to decide, not the Europeans. If we

want to say somebody should go to prison forever because he is killed

his entire family or a whole series of other pe?I ? of other pe we

are talking about. We should be able say that it is not for the court to

tell Parliament what to do about that. Let's bring us back to some

domestic disclosures, particularly UKIP. You have been writing some

interesting things about that, suggesting in effect that there is

something to do with the relationship between David Cameron

and ordinary people which is not working. Classes always

characterised, but what is really about is people feeling that we are

out of touch with them. It's not We are out of touch. There was a

survey in the last few days which said that the majority of the party

felt that we did not respect them. That is really serious. I think it

party membership. That is one of the reasons UKIP have done very well in

the last local elections. People were saying, I was at the polling

station, and people were saying that they're going to vote for UKIP

because of the language that we were using. Swivel eyed loons if I recall

correctly. Is it puzzle you that there are so many inner circle of

David Cameron. When I was in business, they used to be rules

about individuals recruiting people just like himself. We all do it, I

would be just as likely to recruit ex- working-class grammar

schoolboys. I have said to him, look, I don't care if you are all

Nobel Prize winners in physics. If you are all the same, it makes you

blind in some areas. And voters see that labour is. What is UKIP? They

are sort of a primary colours concern. It is a caricature of the

80s that your party. It is no -- a nice simple message to get across.

Maybe one of David Cameron is obvious answers to this is to

promote someone with a working-class background, are they -- grammar

schoolboy... I see what you are getting at. But that sort of person.

There are plenty of people in our benches from a low background, very

capable, then maybe he should think about. We do worry about the number

of women and ethnic minorities. Perhaps we should worry about the

number of people with the ordinary public would identify with. That is