HOW THE BBC BU
MI5 attack on Left-wing paper’s leaks played down
MI5’s scathing criticisms of The Guardian newspaper were underplayed by the BBC, it was claimed last night.
The corporation’s flagship current affairs show Newsnight, which is edited by former Guardian executive Ian Katz, failed to report spy chief Andrew Parker’s speech on Tuesday.
Other BBC reports, including the News at Ten, online articles and radio bulletins, referred to his speech but made no mention of his key claim that the Left-leaning newspaper had done ‘enormous damage’.
Tory MP Conor Burns, who sits on the culture, media and sport committee, said: ‘It is extraordinary that the biggest security story for a generation wasn’t deemed worthy of comment by the BBC’s leading investigative news programme.
‘There seems to be a clear conflict of interest when its editor has so recently taken the Guardian’s shilling. The whole tone of the BBC’s coverage of this issue seems to indicate clear editorial bias.
‘They appear to be protecting their Left-wing friends’.
The BBC did not change its online coverage to reflect the row until Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger publicly defended his newspaper yesterday. He appeared on Radio 4’s World at One programme, where he was largely unchallenged, to say his paper’s coverage had prompted ‘necessary debate’.
Only then did the BBC update its online news articles to reflect the Guardian’s critical role in the leaks with the headline, ‘Guardian to publish more Snowden intelligence revelations’.
Before joining Newsnight last month, Mr Katz worked for the Guardian for 23 years and served as its deputy editor.
Mr Parker made his speech at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall on Tuesday.
His unambiguous warnings about ‘ terrorists’ contrasted with the BBC’s reluctance to use the word in its reports. The corporation was criticised during its coverage of the recent Kenyan massacre for describing the perpetrators as ‘militants’.
Although the speech was covered by the BBC’s News at Ten on Tuesday, it ignored Mr Parker’s criticisms of the Guardian.
Instead, reporter Gordon Corera chose to focus on Mr Parker’s gen- eral warnings that the security of the UK was under threat and made no reference to the newspaper.
At 10.30pm, Newsnight chose to ignore the subject. Surprisingly, the current affairs show did find time to screen an interview with Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon.
Online, the BBC news website’s main article on Mr Parker’s speech – written by security correspondent Frank Gardner – also glossed over Mr Parker’s criticisms.
Entitled ‘MI5 chief Andrew Parker warns of Islamist threat to UK’, it made only a passing reference to the role of the Guardian in the affair.
The f ollowing morning, news bulletins on BBC Radio 4 failed to mention the newspaper at all.
Tory MP Rob Hall said: ‘ The Guardian i s being accused of putting the safety of the public in danger, but the BBC has done virtually nothing to inform its own licence fee payers about it.
‘The behaviour and the regulation of the Press is once again in the public eye, but the BBC is in danger of presenting a very partial and distorted view of the behaviour of newspapers.’
A BBC spokesman said the fact Mr Katz used to work for the Guardian had ‘absolutely no bearing’ on his editorial judgment.
He added: ‘Newsnight didn’t cover the story on Tuesday because it was covered thoroughly on the News at Ten and we didn’t feel we could add significantly to that coverage, and because Newsnight devoted 30 minutes to a report, interview and debate about many of the same issues last week.
‘This is an on-going story which BBC News has covered as it developed, including the criticisms from Andrew Parker, and we will continue to cover it.’
SECURITY services tend to downplay l eaks. That is why this week’s blistering criticisms of l eaks published in The Guardian by the new head of MI5 is so extraordinary.
Britain’s top spook, Andrew Parker, is not a man given to exaggeration. He is a measured, careful and understated person.
But he has been driven to make his remarks because The Guardian’s decision to print confidential intelligence files stolen by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has been a national security catastrophe for the UK and the US.
What journalist Glenn Greenwald – the conduit for the leaked information – and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger have done not only imperils Britain and our allies, it will continue to do so for years to come.
People who choose to leak secrets do so for any number of reasons. But they very often have one thing in common.
Blinded by their self-righteousness, they invariably underestimate what other people will do with the information they feel the world has a right to know. The question that they – along with the editors and journalists who act as their medium – should be asking is not ‘what do I gain from this document’ but ‘what could our enemies gain from this document?’
If Mr Rusbridger and company failed to ask this question, they are grossly negligent. If they did ask it, and yet continued to print, they are worse than criminal.
By so promiscuously publishing the Snowden files, they broadcast detailed information on Britain’s data-gathering methods to the whole world. And they did so in the knowledge that there is any number of individuals, organisations and countries who want to harm Britain and the West. Just take the example of international terrorists.
As Andrew Parker said, there are thousands of people inside the UK – as well as outside – who seek to kill and maim British people on our streets.
The security service plays a continuous game of cat and mouse with them.
In the years since 7/7, MI5 and MI6 have foiled at least one mass-casualty terrorist attack every year, and thousands of lives have been saved.
THESE intelligence successes include plots to bring down airliners and blow up and destroy major London landmarks.
How do you think such plots are thwarted? Of course, a massive factor is surveillance. And while terrorists have become increasingly wary of using the internet because of this surveillance, it remains a tool on which they have to rely at times.
Terrorist groups such as Al Shabaab – which carried out last month’s shopping mall attack in Kenya – employ tactics so barbaric and medieval that many believe they do without computer technology.
But the truth is that such groups are distinctly progressive when it comes t o communication. Al Shabaab members were Twittering throughout the Nairobi atrocity, even as they were torturing and murdering their victims.
Now, The Guardian and Snowden have given these terrorists the most detailed information on how the National Security Agency in America and GCHQ (the organisation which gathers intelligence for both MI5 and MI6) trace their activity in cyberspace. This includes exactly which computer systems the security services can access directly.
The publication of this list alone will have done unquantifiable damage. It allows terrorists and others to work out which systems would be safest to use.
All a terrorist group now needs to do is to ensure they never use any of the systems on The Guardian’s list.
But states that are not friendly to Britain as well as rogue terrorist organisations will benefit massively from these leaks of security information – and two countries in particular: Russia and China.
Both are on the rise. Both are ruled by brutal regimes that suppress their critics and refuse to countenance giving the press any of the niceties we observe in Britain.
Both are also, incidentally, places where Snowden sought asylum – first skulking away to Hong Kong and then to Moscow, where he stayed. During his time on Chinese soil, Snowden was holed up in the Russian consulate. As one security expert I spoke to put it: ‘There is no way in hell that Snowden left that building without the Chinese having sucked out of him all the information he had.’
The same is most certainly also the case with the Russians.
These i ssues are of immense importance for several reasons. First, because the Moscow and Beijing regimes now have a fuller picture of the inner workings of our security agencies. They know exactly who Britain is keeping an eye on, where and how.
FOR example, The Guardian has already revealed that the US government has hacked into computers in mainland China and spied on Brazilian officials. And while we all know that spying goes on, it is unprecedented for our competitors and opponents to have this kind of official confirmation on where and how such activities occur. What’s more, the leaks have jeopardised our own cyber security measures.
For, in recent years, attacks from China have grown exponentially. There are few major British companies which have not had to take security measures to limit the effect of this vast scale of espionage.
Whenever our government has complained in the past about such illegal intervention to Chinese officials, it is, of course, met with denials. But now, they will be greeted with derision and accusations of hypocrisy because a British newspaper has provided official confirmation that we and our allies have engaged in similar illicit behaviour.
The attempts by The Guardian to limit this risk have been laughable. Mr Greenwald has claimed that the original Snowden files – which The Guardian copied and distributed to a variety of locations – are safe from state-sponsored prying.
He claims that the encryptions used by Snowden means the Russian security apparatus could never decode them. This argument is beyond ridiculous. There is not a security expert in the world who believes that the Russian or Chinese intelligence services could not break these codes within a matter of seconds. So what are we left with as we survey this wreckage?
The former head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, said last week at a Henry Jackson Society meeting in Westminster, that people may consider that some of our government’s data-gathering techniques are ‘unwise’.
But he added: ‘There is no argument that they are illegal. They have been authorised by two presidents, both Houses of Congress, and the American court system.’
Endless effort has been put in by The Guardian to prove otherwise, but in vain. What the newspaper has indulged in over this Snowden affair truly IS a ‘gift’ to terrorists as well as to every one of this country’s enemies – and all because of the schoolboy vanity of a few left-wing journalists. Douglas Murray is associate director of the Henry Jackson
Society think tank