BARRY COLLINS We’re losing the plot in the war against terror.
We don’t need to surrender any more of our privacy to the surveillance services
Anyone remember the halcyon days of terrorism? “It used to be that people used to steam open envelopes or just listen into phones when they wanted to find out what people were doing,” claimed the Home Secretary recently. Now, your modern-day terrorist has a “secret place” to plot attacks, on WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging services. Your average counter-terrorism Bobby doesn’t stand a chance. Except it’s not true. Not even close.
Firstly, let’s deal with the notion that “the threat of terrorism is greater than it ever has been”. That’s statistically, emphatically false. There have been fewer than a hundred terrorism-related deaths in the UK since the turn of the century, including the recent attacks. This compares to 1,094 deaths in the 15-year period before that, and 2,211 between 1970 and 1984, according to the Global Terrorism Database.
And while nobody’s complacent about terrorist organisations capable of wiping out thousands of lives by smashing planes into tower blocks, let’s not forget that the Libyans blew up a plane over Lockerbie and the IRA bombed Canary Wharf in the mid-1990s. It’s reasonable to argue that the only reason the Docklands death toll wasn’t considerably higher (two people died) was because the IRA phoned in a warning 90 minutes beforehand. Is there anything more quintessentially British than terrorists giving you a sporting chance to escape a terror attack? (That’s a little joke for the Republicans in the house.)
So, your chances of dying in a terror attack are vanishingly small. Almost as many people died from falling off a ladder in 2011 (52) than died in the London bombings in 2005 (56). The stairs are around 120 times more lethal than Islamic terrorists (falling down them leads to 700 deaths per year), according to the Office of National Statistics. You don’t need a bunker to keep your family safe, you need a bungalow.
Of course, it’s not a bungalow boom that the Home Secretary is calling for, it’s access to the encrypted messages on services such as WhatsApp, based largely on reports that the Westminster terrorist sent a message via the service three minutes before the attack. Would access to WhatsApp have saved lives? It seems highly unlikely, as Adrian Ajao wasn’t regarded as a current threat, and the Home Secretary’s not calling for blanket access to encrypted messaging services – merely the ability to intercept messages sent and received by current suspects.
Even if Ajao had been on a watchlist, there’s no guarantee the right message would have been intercepted at the right time to thwart the attack. Back in Amber Rudd’s “good old days” when police could tap telephone calls and steam open letters, they didn’t foil the Brighton, Manchester or Docklands bombings.
Indeed, far from having their hands tied by modern technology, the security services are much better equipped to track terrorists today than they were at the height of the IRA campaign. Had Ajao been a prime terror suspect, for instance, the police would almost certainly have been monitoring his internet activity and mobile data – alerting them to his hiring a car and booking into a hotel at the other end of the country, let alone communications with terrorist cells.
The police would also have been alerted the moment he made any transactions on known credit or debit cards, quite unlike the 1980s, when credit cards were swiped on a carbon copier – the only chance of detecting suspect cards was if the sales assistant checked the number against a printed list.
If the police surveillance team had lost their suspect, they could have traced his whereabouts using mobile phone cell data. Then there’s the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system that’s used in the capital, especially in the Congestion Charge Zone, not to mention the CCTV cameras that have near-blanket coverage on London’s streets. Some of those cameras even offer facial recognition.
The plain truth is the security services are better equipped than ever to keep tabs on terrorists, and that’s reflected in the statistics. We’re told that the police thwart a dozen or more terrorist plots per year, and it’s plausible – especially given the liberties the security forces take with our personal data. Last October, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – the only court permitted to hear claims against MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – said that the security services had operated an illegal regime to collect vast amounts of communications data, such as phone and internet records, for 17 years.
One of the reasons innocent citizens use encrypted services such as WhatsApp is because they’re sick of mass surveillance and crave privacy, even if they have nothing to hide. Government has no right to peer inside every aspect of our lives, even in the name of terror prevention. It may be a safe haven for terrorists, but it’s one for the rest of us too.
One of the reasons innocent citizens use encrypted services like WhatsApp is because they are sick of mass surveillance