The United Kingdom has a 21st century Chicken Little who has used a public platform to officially proclaim that the sky is falling. He is Andrew Parker, a graduate of Cambridge University who 30 years after joining Britain's domestic security agency, MI5 or the Security Service, became its new head in April of this year. In London on 8 October he gave his first public speech at a session at the Royal United Services Institute, a safe and unchallenging environment for the warning he was about to deliver. That warning wasn't merely about the threat of terrorism to the United Kingdom, a regular refrain from his predecessors. Instead, it was an opportunity to use the threat of terrorism to batter both growing public concern over invasions by state security into personal privacy and the media which has published stories that the British establishment doesn't like. Those stories related to surveillance through technology and began when National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency employee Edward Snowden started to leak top secret documents to Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald in May 2013. Although Snowden's employment was connected to American intelligence agencies, the close relationship between those bodies and their British counterparts meant that inevitably blowback would be experienced on the other side of the Atlantic as well toward Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the NSA. In the aftermath of World War Two, Britain and the United States, along with British allies Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, signed the UKUSA agreement, a framework for the sharing of intelligence acquired through technological means. Snowden's revelations then had an inevitability of dragging in other countries besides the United States involved in such a close intelligence sharing relationship that has gone on for over half a century. The United Kingdom has been one of those nations and its political and institutional elite has not been happy. Historically, the UK has been far behind its closest allies in providing proper oversight and transparency regarding its intelligence services. Not until the 1990s was the British media allowed to publish the names of the directors of MI5 and MI6. In comparison, the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, had his face on Time magazine in the 1950s. The British intelligence services are simply not used to the sort of media and political scrutiny that allied agencies receive in other democracies. Hence the shock to the system as a result of the Snowden revelations and Parker's resort to playing the terror card in an effort to undermine both calls for greater accountability on the part of British intelligence agencies but also the Guardian newspaper's continuing publication of the stories. Enemies of the Guardian, including elsewhere in the British media, have been quick to follow Parker's lead and bash the newspaper for being disloyal and putting British lives at risk. Even former cabinet minister in the Blair government, Jack Straw, joined the chorus by suggesting that the Guardian stories could undermine British intelligence's ability to prevent "another 7th of July 2005." The irony of Straw's comment, of course, is that he was part of the brain trust that opted to invade Iraq in 2003 despite the warning from the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee, composed of the three main intelligence agencies, that the invasion would increase the chances of a terrorist attack against the United Kingdom.
The problem is that Parker's suggestion that Snowden's revelations provide terrorists "the gift to evade us and strike at will" simply doesn't hold up to any basic scrutiny. First, Parker noted the diffused nature of the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom. In an era of lone actor terrorists or attacks involving two individuals with knives on a solider in the street, technological surveillance is of less relevance than in the past. More importantly, the idea that terrorists were previously oblivious to technological surveillance is simply ridiculous. There is clear evidence over several years of their efforts to avoid detection through a number of different means. This is one reason why human intelligence remains crucial for those engaged in counter-terrorism. The best refutation of Parker's silly proposition is the late Osama bin Laden. Years before his death, bin Laden was aware of the technological capabilities of those in pursuit of him. It is why he stopped using a satellite telephone well before 9-11, relying instead on trusted couriers to distribute his missives. And it was one of these couriers who American intelligence eventually followed straight to the leader of al-Qaeda's compound in Abbotabad.
As they spied on the structure in an effort to determine who lived there, one curiosity increased their belief that someone significant was inside: the house had no telephone or internet connection, clear evidence of an attempt to prevent communications from being monitored. Arguably then, bin Laden had put himself at risk not because he was ignorant of the sort of technological surveillance that Snowden has revealed but because he already had a clear idea of what could be used against him. And the wider implication of that knowledge for serious terrorist organizations is that it limits their ability to communicate out of fear of discovery. So the new head of MI5 may warn that the sky is falling and quickly find his lamentations being echoed by media and political acolytes, but that doesn't make his concerns any more legitimate than those of Chicken Little in the children's story.
