UNAUTHORISED TELEPHONE MONITORING (Hansard, 20 February 1967)

§ Mr. Peter Bessell (Bodmin)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to prohibit monitoring of private telephone conversations by unauthorised persons. The attention of the public was excited by Questions in the House on 17th November last year on the tapping of the telephone conversations of right hon. and hon. Members. Naturally, I accept without qualification the assurance given to the House on that occasion by the Prime Minister that there is no tapping of the telephones of right hon. and hon. Members. The House will, however, recognise, and I am sure that the Prime Minister would agree, that that undertaking applied only to tapping of telephone conversations by the authority of the Secretary of State, the Prime Minister or other responsible Ministers.

I would like to make it clear at the outset that my Bill does not seek to restrict in any way the provision whereby telephone conversations of any person, be he a Member of the House or not, shall be the subject of monitoring in the interests of the security of the State, provided that such monitoring or tapping is undertaken on the authority of the Secretary of State. Nor would it restrict the provisions which already exist to permit the police to carry out their work by this means and that also of the officers of Customs and Excise. These things were recommended in Part III of the Report of the Committee of Privy Councillors appointed to inquire into the interception of communications, as presented to Parliament by the then Prime Minister in October, 1957. My sole objective is to prevent unauthorised persons from using mechanical devices 1052 which enable them to listen to or to record the private telephone conversations of people using the Post Office telephone service.

It is important to note that in the Report which was submitted to the House in 1957, and to which I have referred, the Committee, which comprised the late Lords Birkett and Monckton and the present Minister without Portfolio, the right hon. Member for Leyton (Mr. Gordon Walker), stated in paragraph 130 that whilst unauthorised tapping of telephone conversations might be more difficult in this country than in America, there was no certainty that such tapping did not occur. The Committee continued, in paragraph 131: In these circumstances Parliament may wish to consider whether legislation should be passed to render the unauthorised tapping of a telephone line an offence. I recognise that there are certain difficulties of a technical nature, but I am advised that these need not present a serious problem. For example, anyone who has a telephone installed by the G.P.O. on a party line is informed of this arrangement by the appropriate telephone manager and is, therefore, aware that he cannot expect his conversations to be treated as confidential. There is every possibility that another subscriber on the party line may accidentally overhear the conversation by picking up another instrument. There is also the inevitable problem which occurs as a result of mechanical difficulties and failures at the telephone exchange which will result in what most people know as a crossed line, which again results in other persons overhearing a conversation between people using a separate telephone. These are hazards to which every subscriber is subject and which he must accept as inevitable.

There is, however, a grave distinction between an accidental interception by a third party of a telephone conversation and the deliberate tapping of a telephone or telephone lines with the specific intention of obtaining information which may be of pecuniary value to the person obtaining the information or which is a deliberate and calculated intrusion upon the liberty and privacy of the individual—an individual who is not suspected of any criminal activity or of anything likely to be detrimental to the security of the State. 1053 Not for the first time, Mr. Bernard Braden rendered a service to the public by his exposure of the ease whereby any person or corporate body may arrange for a private telephone to be tapped through agencies which are willing to do this for a fee without question or inquiry as to the reason why the person engaging them wishes another individual's telephone to be tapped and the conversation monitored.

In his programme "On the Braden Beat" on 17th December last year, Mr. Braden revealed that he had been able to discover without difficulty two agencies who were delighted to tell him that on payment of a fee they would arrange for anyone's telephone to be tapped. They were not in the least concerned with the reasons why Mr. Braden's investigators might require this to be done.

There are three reasons why I believe this practice to be extremely dangerous. In the nature of business today, it is customary for members of boards of directors or the executives of companies to transmit vital information to each other or to business associates by telephone. It therefore follows that trade secrets, business negotiations and other matters affecting the progress of private or public companies or nationalised industries, and, consequently, the employment of many people, could be jeopardised. The State has a duty to protect corporate bodies and individuals against the abuse of a privacy which is vital for the progress of industry and commerce.

Secondly, it is surely quite wrong that judicial decisions, for example, in cases of divorce, should be prejudiced or even influenced by information or evidence obtained by these means and which is totally contrary to the standards of liberty and personal privacy which have been safeguarded so vigorously by this House over the centuries.

A case was reported in The Times of 26th January involving the recording of private telephone conversations of several individuals who featured in a divorce action. In the Evening Standard of 25th January, with reference to that case, it was reported that private detectives had made secret tape recordings for some six months. I cannot believe that there is any lawyer in the House who would 1054 approve of the violation of privacy exposed by that case.

It has been represented to me also—I do not stress this too far but it has been represented—that, in addition to the danger of trade secrets and so forth being disclosed and the intrusion on privacy, there is the sinister threat of an unfriendly Government obtaining the services of an agency, or, for that matter, doing the work themselves, to monitor the private telephones of civil servants, members of the Government or other responsible persons who might be compelled in an emergency to discuss matters on the telephone which would affect the security of the State and would normally be subject to the Official Secrets Act.

My Bill has the support of hon. and right hon. Members on both sides of the House and in all parties. I am most grateful to the very many hon. Members who have taken the trouble to write, telephone or speak to me to give me their cordial assurances of wholehearted support. I have not had a single example of an hon. Member expressing other than agreement with this proposed legislation.

I have asked the House to consider three imperative reasons why the Bill should be allowed to commence its progress through Parliament, and I call in aid of my submission the Report of Privy Councillors to which I referred earlier. Since that Report was presented to Parliament, just over nine years ago, there has been conclusive evidence that the suspicion expressed by the Committee is no longer a matter of doubt and that the unauthorised tapping of telephone conversations which the Committee clearly felt to be wholly undesirable now occurs. The suggestion contained in paragraph 131 of the Report should, therefore, be acted upon.

Finally, I appeal to every hon. and right hon. Member to support the Bill not only because I believe that it will be welcomed by the public at large, by the legal profession and by all who are concerned with the security of our nation but, most of all, because privacy and liberty are one and indivisible. This is a comparatively small Measure but it is designed to protect something which is at the foundation of our national heritage, 1055 namely, the right of every honest citizen to security and privacy.