The Guardian view on surveillance after Paris

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/09/guardian-view-surveillance-after-paris

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With two hostage crises playing out in parallel, one given an especially sinister dimension by the targeting of a kosher supermarket, today’s pictures from Paris underlined a jihadi threat that is ugly and real. Before the standoffs reached their bloody climax, it was reported that one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen had trained with militants in Yemen. A link had also emerged between these two brothers and the police-killer behind the supermarket siege, in which several hostages are thought dead. Islamist terrorists may be rare, but nobody who cares for peace or freedom can doubt the duty on the state to disrupt such menacing networks.

Against this backdrop, the head of MI5 is bound to command attention, and on Thursday night Andrew Parker gave a speech about rising threats to British security. He pointed with justified pride to disrupted plots. He stressed, too, that there could be no guarantee that every attack would be averted. To have pretended otherwise would have been wrong. But Mr Parker is also, in his way, a political player, well aware that spelling out how a UK attack was “highly likely” will strengthen his hand in the ongoing push for powers. And he used the attention that he had grabbed in this way to make a disingenuous case for the sort of snooping whose exposure by Edward Snowden in 2013 caused outrage around the world.

The director-general whispered sweet reason. He emphasised the oversight the agency faces, and rejected, he said, the lazy insistence that more security had to mean less privacy. The tone was good; it was the substance that was wanting. He explained how decrypted emails of extremists had been used to foil one major airline plot, and how information was forensically recovered from a second bunch of fanatics, bent on blowing up London landmarks, after their arrest. Such pinpointed (and legally controlled) intelligence work might, perhaps, also have made a difference in Paris, where both the Charlie Hebdo murderers were on watchlists.

Mr Parker, however, lurched from detailing such targeted work to making oblique allusions to the entirely sweeping, and until 2013 entirely unacknowledged, probing of communication records, and the interference with internet traffic on the often-spurious pretext that it is “international” in a purely technical sense. These are the practices that give the state such chilling potential to keep exhaustive tabs on so many citizens. But the effect of Mr Parker’s intervention is to kick back against necessary reforms, and to pile on the pressure to put these controversial practices on to a permanent footing. As for the oversight he gave such weight to, its weakness was evident today when the chair of the intelligence and security committee, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, uncritically echoed virtually everything that he had said, blithely asserting that it wasn’t the intelligence agencies’ job to spy on ordinary people, as if the Snowden revelations had never happened.

Britain is still crying out for a debate that the security services continue to duck. The dreadful events of Paris do not change that position at all.