Heavy online policing ‘could push terrorists to dark web’
GOVERNMENT policing of social media to thwart terror plotters risks breaching the European Convention on Human Rights and driving them on to the dark web instead, the UK’S terrorism law watchdog has said.
Max Hill QC said controlling social media would come “at a very high price if it interferes with the freedom of communication which every citizen enjoys and which is also enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights [ECHR].” Mr Hill, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, highlighted “acute” difficulties in identifying contact between extremists in the digital age.
In his report into the authorities’ use of terrorism laws in 2016, he said some terrorists “may have reached their murderous state having been influenced by what they read and what they see online, just as much as by whom they meet”.
He said: “Where these awful crimes are facilitated by the use of social media, we want to close down the criminals’ ability to communicate.” But, he said: “Would we risk unenforceable infringements on ECHR rights, and/or would we push the current abundance of evidence proving terrorist activity online to go offline or underground, into impenetrable places within the dark web, from which clear evidence rarely emerges, and where the placement of a robust counter-narrative to terrorism is hard to effect and harder to gauge?”
Mr Hill said driving material, “however offensive”, into underground spaces online would be “counter-productive” if would-be terrorists could still get to it.
He said: “Once this material goes underground, it is harder for law enforcement to detect and much harder for good people to argue against it, to show how wrong the radical propaganda really is.” Robert Hannigan, the former head of GCHQ, earlier this week predicted that web giants would face legislation around the world within the year if they did not do more to stamp out terrorist use of their platforms.
Theresa May yesterday warned: “Technology companies still need to go further in stepping up to their responsibilities for dealing with harmful and illegal online activity. These companies simply cannot stand by while their platforms are used to facilitate child abuse, modern slavery or the spreading of terrorist and extremist content.”