Lord Clement-Jones (LD)

My Lords, I was delighted to see these amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. He, the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, and I, along with many other parliamentarians, have long argued for changes to the Computer Misuse Act. For context, the original Act was created largely in response to a famous incident in which professional hackers and a technology journalist broke into British Telecom’s Prestel system in the mid-1980s. The Bill received Royal Assent in June 1990, barely two months after Tim Berners-Lee and CERN made the world wide web publicly available for the first time. Who remembers Prestel? Perhaps this is the wrong House in which to ask that question. As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, explained, there is no statutory public interest defence in the Act. This omission creates a legal risk for cybersecurity researchers and professionals conducting legitimate activities in the public interest. The Post Office Horizon scandal demonstrated how critical independent computer system investigation is for uncovering systemic problems and highlighted the need for protected legal pathways for researchers and investigators to examine potentially flawed systems. I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, is here for this set of amendments. His Pro-innovation Regulation of Technologies Review explicitly recommends incorporating such a defence to provide stronger legal protections for cybersecurity researchers and professionals engaged in threat intelligence research. This recommendation was rooted in the understanding that such a defence would have, it said, “a catalytic effect on innovation” within the UK’s cybersecurity sector, which possesses “considerable growth potential”.