Speeches by Narayan.

“In its implementation of the online aspects of foreign interference as they relate to the Online Safety Act, Ofcom reports to us in the DSIT context.”

“As you will appreciate, foreign interference offences have a series of offline instances. You will be very well aware of widely covered cases, not least those subject to court action at the moment. Of course, the offline cases are not in the ambit of Ofcom, and so they are dealt with by the Home Office. Regarding onlin…”

“As an offence, it is owned by the Home Office.”

“No, not at all. In fact, it is the opposite. The elements of foreign interference covered in the Online Safety Act come from the offence but the foreign interference offence covers offline stuff, which is totally separate from the—”

“If we speak about very specific amendments, MHCLG is of course the Department leading on it, and we are contributing. I am engaging very closely with my colleagues in MHCLG on the question.”

“Yes. Foreign interference as an offence is very much owned by the Home Office. There are some aspects of deepfakes that I am involved in. The question of personality rights, for example, is a question that is very much in scope for my role.”

“On the first question of whether it is an offence or not, ostensibly it feels totally wrong to me. Given the threshold set in the law, which is that you just need reasonable grounds to infer foreign interference, not conclusive proof of it, without pre-empting the individual cases, to me it would feel like there is a p…”

“I try to limit it but of course I do, yes.”

“I have answered a very large number of oral questions and written questions on this particular theme and they relate very much to ensuring the scope of the team’s operational activity is appropriate. But as you will appreciate, in this context—as in other contexts of looking at operational national security responses—w…”

“There are two separate questions here. One is the question of who is responsible. You have rightly answered that yourself in that context: Ofcom is responsible for the implementation of the law. There is a separate question from responsibility, which is are the thresholds appropriate at the moment? First, as I mentione…”

“On this broader question of raising public awareness of the sorts of threats that we are seeing across Government, I am very interested in what we can do across Government. I have to confess, especially when foreign states are involved, it is an FCDO lead, so I do not want to speak on their behalf. One thing I am very …”

“Which I value very much too. That is the starting diagnosis. On the prescription, my honest sense is that the question of institutional redesign is potentially something to consider but I am much more focused on how we can do both law and enforcement—I will come to each of those in a second—in a much more intense and r…”

“I am very happy to take a deeper look at what other countries’ experiences have been. As I mentioned at the outset, I feel at the moment that institution design is not really the thing stopping us from going further. It is getting the legal context absolutely right in the light of the changing context of risk, and then…”

“I speak to them on a regular basis, and so does the rest of Government.”

“Yes. The short answer to whether we will see more action and to an extent awareness is on the action front. On the awareness front, I would like us to. Again, I have to concede that the Foreign Office is better placed to make the appropriate judgments on which instances of foreign engagement to make public or not. It i…”

“One thing I have made a case for is that we need a collective agreement across Departments on where we want to make more information available in the public domain on these contexts. I have to repeat the caveat that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is very much the lead and understands deeper than any o…”

“The online aspect of it has been live since July, so about 10 months. Platforms have conducted risk assessments that look in particular at the threat of foreign interference. One thing Ofcom has realised is that there are some platforms where the risk of foreign interference is higher still. In those cases, Ofcom is no…”

“I am aware that Ofcom engages very consistently on reviewing risk assessments and compliance of the platforms’ duties, especially illegal content duties, which is the subject here. I am not aware of data on prosecutions or referrals that it has made in the light of illegal instances in this context.”

“I do not think that is something Ofcom has publicised, rightly, in the course of a consultation.”

“We do not have a global number but we can certainly come back to you with as much as we can.”