Does the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee provide effective oversight of
the intelligence and security agencies?
This essay will explore whether or not the Intelligence and Security Committee, perhaps more commonly known as the ISC is able to provide effective oversight of the intelligence and security agencies. It will be argued that in recent years, sometimes through no fault of its own, the ISC has become ineffective at doing its job. There are many reasons for this including the effects of how the committee is formed, the agencies that it overlooks not being transparent with it and the suspicion of leaks within the committee.
The parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee is a government committee that is responsible for overseeing the three largest security and intelligence agencies that are currently in use in the United Kingdom (House of Commons, 2018, 3). These are MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
MI5 is the intelligence agency that is in charge of keeping the United Kingdom’s domestic affairs in order and in a state of safety. MI5 has identified many threats to ‘national security’ since it was established in 1909 (MI5, 2018a) but in today’s society the four main threats that it is focused on protecting us from are ‘terrorism’, ‘espionage’ from other, perhaps hostile states that want to use UK information for their own personal gain, cyber-attacks from not just other states but from potential terrorists or even those who believe that they are doing it for a good cause, these people are known as ‘hacktivists’. The final threat is from ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (MI5, 2018b) such as nuclear weapons in addition to chemical and biological weapons such as anthrax that was first used as a weapon in China in 1932 (BBC News, 2001).
Despite their very similar sounding names the MI6 agency is different to MI5 in that it protects the United Kingdom from much of the same issues such as terrorism, hacking or espionage but MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service as it is also called, does this abroad (Secret Intelligence Service MI6). The Secret Intelligence Service aim to work abroad in order to collect information that could possibly be used to prevent crime, terrorism or even to prevent economic downfall back in the United Kingdom (Secret Intelligence Service MI6).
The final agency that the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee aims to oversee is GCHQ. GCHQ stands for the Government Communications Headquarters (House of Commons, 2018, 4) and they are mainly focused around communications and over the years this has ranged from telegrams during World War One to the more complicated nature of communications today (GCHQ, 2018).
Currently, the Intelligence and Security Committee reports to parliament and on occasion, the Prime Minister directly when its nine members come across matters of great importance, but this has not always been the case. When the committee was first established in 1994 as part of the Intelligence Services Act it aimed to ensure that the policies that were in place in addition to the ‘administration and expenditure’ of the three main intelligence services was being closely watched a scrutinised (House of Commons, 2018, 4). This was seen as an important new development because the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom were finally being admitted to and talked about a lot more openly than they had been in the past (Defty, 2018b) and so this was a way of holding these agencies accountable in the same way that any other government agency would be. However, in 2013 the Justice and Security Act involved reform to the Intelligence and Security Committee by giving it more power. For example, this included allowing the Intelligence and Security Committee to view anything that the agencies were doing by taking away the power that the head of the agencies used to have to stop this, from 2013 onwards, the only way that this could be stopped was by order of the Secretary of State (Parliament, 2018). The current openness of the government in terms how much information they are now giving to the general public about the three main security and intelligence agencies has come a long way, especially considering the secrecy that used to be surrounding these organisations and the previous failure from the British government to even admit their existence. However, despite the changes that have been made since the committee’s establishment in 1994 there are still many people who believe that there is still much to be done until the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee provide effective oversight of the intelligence and security agencies.
There could perhaps be many reasons why some do not believe in the effectiveness of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, one of these could be the extended amount of time that it takes for the committee to be re-established after each general election and the effects that this has. The Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee is made up of nine members of parliament that are chosen by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition after a new general election and a Prime minister is chosen (House of Commons, 2018, 4) and so this would reasonably take a fair amount of time for the Prime minister to make up all of the committees that are needed as part of their government. However despite the allowance for time being taken to carefully chose the members for such an important committee the amount of time that was taken for the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee to be created after both the 2015 and 2017 general elections far surpassed anything that would have been expected (Defty, 2018a). For example, after the 2015 general election, the new government took four months to establish the new committee and this timescale is made even more potentially disastrous consider that this was six months after the last meeting of the previous committee (Defty, 2018a). Despite considerable protests from the chair of the committee about ensuring that it was established more quickly in the next election, in 2017 it was, yet again, left until last, taking the government five months to establish it (Defty, 2018a). This overly extended period of time that the government has been without an intelligence and security committee means that the amount of work that they have to complete has only been left to pile up and that important reports and investigations were left unattended to. An example of this is an enquiry by the ISC into the way that UK intelligence and security agencies treat their prisoners (Dunleavy et al., 2018, 175). Depending on the outcome of this enquiry it could have become an important matter of human rights, however, having been first introduced in 2013 it was still left uncompleted in May of 2018 (Defty, 2018a). This gap of five years where important pieces of work were left unattended to in addition to the committee being left unformed for almost a year the committee was left unable to do its job in a time of increasing worry and threat of terrorist attacks and pressure on the agencies that it was meant to be overseeing could be said to show, perhaps through no fault of its own, its current ineffectiveness to do its job. However, despite the disruption that has been caused by the time it has taken to create the committee after each election it could be suggested that it was done in favour of ensuring that the government does not use its power to undermine parliament by choosing MPs to be in the ISC that parliament may want to put into other parliamentary committees (Defty, 2015). Nonetheless, this does not excuse the detrimental effects that this has had on the effectiveness of the committee.
In addition to the considerable backlog of work that the Intelligence and Security Committee was left, it has been suggested that another reason for the proposed ineffectiveness of the committee is that the agencies that it aims to oversee are perhaps not being as transparent with the committee as they should be. This has been an issue brought up by the Intelligence and Security committee failing to mention at GCHQ was accused of intercepting communications as its part in the United States PRISM program (Defty, 2014b). PRISM is the United Stated operated program for electronic surveillance that is ran by the National security agency (The Guardian, 2016). This becomes increasingly worrying because it suggests that agencies, such as GCHQ in this case, are not disclosing all of the information about their activities that is necessary. This particular case was seen as something that should have been disclosed to the committee because it involves GCHQ being accused of intercepting the PRISM program without a warrant (Defty, 2014b) being first issued under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act that was introduced in 2000 (Legislation.gov.uk). The incident in question could possibly suggest that GCHQ was taking part in illegal activities that put peoples human rights at risk for up to seven years. This is because it does not adhere to both articles eight and ten of the ‘European convention on human rights’ (Bowcott, 2015). This could potentially question the effectiveness of the committee because it brings about the possibility that GCHQ were not being open with them and in order to function adequately the committee needs to be able to rely on the agencies that it oversees to be transparent with them in order to oversee their actions and hold them accountable, but if they are not receiving the correct information then they cannot do this, therefore rendering the committee ineffective.
Another possible reason for the ISC to be deemed as ineffective in their oversight of the intelligence and security committees of the UK is that there has been evidence in the past for suspicion that the committee has been subject to leaks (Defty, 2014a). An example of this has been the leaking of the report on the murder of Lee Rigby to ‘The Times’ stating that there was a possibility of the murder being stopped before it happened. The article suggests that ‘committee will say’ (Leppard, 2014) this use of language shows that the committee was yet to release the report and so ‘The Times’ would have had to have got hold of it through a leak. This is perhaps surprising considering that the members of the committee are subject to the Official Secrets Act of 1989 (House of Commons, 2018, 4) which prohibits them from disclosing such information. Whilst they have not been leaks of information that could have the possibility of threatening the national security of the United Kingdom they could possibly prove that the parliamentary committee that is charged with ensuring that the large intelligence and security agencies that are in place to protect the UK are unsuccessful in their job because they are allowing potentially dangerous and confidential information to get into the hands of those who have not been authorised to see it. Therefore, this challenged the security of the committee and questions whether or not they are effective in overseeing MI5, SIS and GCHQ because it suggests that perhaps the nine members of the committee cannot be trusted with the sensitive information that they have at their fingertips, possibly causing detrimental effects to the wellbeing and security of the UK.
To conclude, the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security agency has had many issues in the years since its establishment in 1994 and its reform in 1993. Some of these include a lengthy period of time where the committee was left unattended to, possible leaks in the supposedly secure parliamentary committee and the agencies that it aims to oversee not disclosing information to the committee when it should. All of these issues have caused the efficiency of the committee to be a lot lower than would be expected from a committee that has such an important role in keeping Britain safe.
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