How Snowden has sabotaged spies keeping track on terror
US traitor Edward Snowden has undermined British security by making it much harder for UK spies to fight terrorists, a report warns today.
Intelligence chiefs are increasingly concerned that they are struggling to track extremists, including those from Islamic State, after the fugitive leaked files stolen from GCHQ and the US National Security Agency.
Fanatics and organised crime gangs are using sophisticated new data encryption programmes to avoid detection after learning about spy agencies’ techniques, an independent surveillance review by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank concluded.
Snowden’s disclosure of up to 1.7million classified files presented a ‘significant challenge’ to the authorities tasked with electronically tracking targets who ‘pose a risk to collective security’, experts found. The former CIA contractor stunned the world in June 2013 by leaking information, via newspapers including The Guardian, about attempts by spy agencies to view citizens’ private information, claiming internet history, emails, text messages, calls and passwords were harvested.
He claimed he acted because Western governments’ policies were a ‘threat to democracy’.
But RUSI said there was noevidence that Britain ‘knowingly acts illegally’ when intercepting communications.
Nor was collection of bulk data used to provide a ‘perpetual window’ into the private lives of citizens, it added. The year-long review also:
Called for the Home Secretary to retain the power to sign interception warrants in cases of national security or for counterterror operations, albeit with judicial scrutiny. Police operations would be signed off by a judge.
Risked a row because terror watchdog David Anderson QC’s report into surveillance powers last month said this responsi- bility should pass from ministers to a new panel of judges to improve public confidence.
Demanded a ‘new, comprehensive and clear’ legal framework for intercepting communications, replacing ‘inadequate’ UK laws that have been repeatedly patched up over the past decade.
Concluded that encrypted data should not, as a principle, ‘be beyond the reach of law enforcement’.
Warned that new, smaller internet companies were deleting potentially-invaluable data and tipping off their customers if police and security agencies requested information.
The 154-page report was commissioned from RUSI by then deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in the wake of claims by Snowden that GCHQ was engaging in unlawful mass surveillance.
The study was prepared by a group of experts including three former heads of UK intelligence and security services: Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, ex-head of MI6 Sir John Scarlett and former director general of MI5 Jonathan Evans.
It found that MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police feared being locked out of the communications of dangerous suspects, including jihadists, because they were using encrypted emails which were harder to decode.
‘A risk to our collective security’