Against The Very Freedoms

Henry Porter writes:

Soon after the attacks in Paris last week, the director general of MI5, Andrew Parker, said of the jihadi threat: “Whenever we lose visibility of what they are saying to each other, so our ability to understand and mitigate the threat they pose is reduced.”

Few would disagree with this sentiment, or in any way underestimate the enormous responsibility counter-terrorist agencies face after the killings, but the coded suggestion that MI5 needs further sweeping surveillance powers to track down terrorists is more controversial, because it doesn’t take into account the facts.

The Kouachi brothers were part of what is known as the Buttes-Chaumont network  and were being watched, on and off, as far back as 2005.

In terms of monitoring, much the same is true of the killers of Lee Rigby, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale; the Boston bomber, Tamerlan Tsnarnaev; and the killer in the attack in Sydney late last year, Man Haron Monis.

The authorities had all the powers they needed to monitor the activities of these men, both physically and electronically.

This is not to blame the agencies concerned, for it is impossible to predict the behaviour of any number of individuals – and agency resources, even in the US, are always going to be finite.

The agencies have to make a call and sometimes that call will be wrong, which is all part of their extraordinarily difficult job.

What is incoherent, and may be regarded as slightly opportunistic, is the agitation for new powers when they already have powers to observe and follow these individuals, and to intercept their communications.

MI5 has recently been required to divert £123m of its £2bn budget to cybersecurity – so what may be needed is more money rather than further intrusive powers.

It is obviously always easier for a government fighting a deficit to pass legislation on the latter, but this is not a sensible way to respond to an attack that was calculated to set people apart and undermine the values of liberty, tolerance and openness.

In other words, we should not compromise the fundamentals of our democratic system by dishing out mass surveillance powers.

No one wants to hamper the security services, but at the same time we must be extraordinarily careful not to harm the essence of our freedom. 

That was surely one message that welled up from the march for liberty, equality and fraternity in Paris on Sunday – a message all those killed at Charlie Hebdo would undoubtedly have subscribed to.

Over the past few days, authoritarian voices from the right and left have expressed much exasperation with liberals, as if the only aims of liberals were to support the terrorists and impede the security agencies.

Max Hastings, writing in the Daily Mail, conflated the issues of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden’s revelations with the attacks, and suggested these had harmed the ability to track people such as the Kouachi brothers.

Like Dan Hodges, writing in the Daily Telegraph last week, Hastings demanded that the agencies be given all the powers they ask for.

With the echo of Churchill’s “give us the tools, and we will finish the job”, Hastings’ argument did not stand up to scrutiny once we understood that all the necessary tools were in place to track the Kouachis.

And terrorists were well aware of electronic surveillance before Bradley Manning and Snowden surfaced to reveal its extent.

These revelations showed that governments had taken more than a few liberties with electronic surveillance and plainly did not have the informed consent of the electorate in this vital area of policy.

Despite all his experience as a great newspaper editor and his undoubted knowledge about the ways of the establishment, Hastings wrote: “I cannot for the life of me imagine what harm can result from MI5 accessing the phone calls, bank accounts, emails of you, me and any other law-abiding citizen.”

Not even MI5 is asking for that, but his point prompts a much wider argument about the accumulation of powers by the state in democracies.

Liberals are above all vigilant democrats who believe that checks and balances are vital to a free society. 

They do not trust governments implicitly because they are aware that powers are always abused, and governments will often do anything to avoid proper scrutiny.

For example, surveillance powers, upgraded in the wake of previous terror attacks, enabled the Metropolitan police to put under close surveillance six journalists who were loosely thought to be investigating government and corporate abuse.

About 2,000 legitimate, mainstream journalists are said to be on the police database.

That hardly inspires confidence in the innate goodness of government, or the authorities’ ability to respect freedoms essential to proper scrutiny.

Hastings’ faith in the establishment must also be shaken by the failure to release the Chilcot report into the Iraq war and the prevarication that has taken place over the allegations of British involvement in torture of terror suspects.

To give further wide-ranging powers to the state now is first of all inappropriate in the context of what we know about the Kouachi brothers and, second, would militate against the very freedoms that were under attack last week.