Leading civil liberty groups declared that a terrorist attack in Britain was a price worth paying to protect mass personal data from being intercepted, it has been revealed.
Victims of atrocities accused the privacy campaigners of protecting terrorists after the comments were exposed in a major report on the snooping activities of Britain’s spy agencies.
MPs and peers who compiled the report also criticised the groups, which include Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Justice and Rights Watch UK.
“We do not subscribe to the point of view that it is acceptable to let some terrorist attacks happen to uphold the individual right to privacy — nor do we believe that the vast majority of the British public would,” parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) said.
MI6, MI5 and GCHQ should instead retain the ability to intercept large volumes of data in the hunt for terrorist suspects and plots, provided that such power was tightly controlled and subjected to safeguards, they said in the report.
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The row emerged as the ISC called for a single act of parliament to cover the work of Britain’s three spy agencies, to make their operations more transparent and abolish the present complex grid of laws. In an unprecedented account of the surveillance state, reports disclosed that:
• Intelligence officials hold a trove of personal data containing millions of records on a wide range of people without statutory oversight.
• Spy agencies use little-known “national security directions” from a 1984 law to compel communications companies to obey their orders.
• Police, spy agencies and public bodies were granted more than half a million warrants to gather communications data last year.
• MI5, MI6 and GCHQ were ordered to destroy large amounts of material gathered from wire taps that they had held for too long.
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Hazel Blears, the Labour MP who is a leading member of the ISC, rejected the allegation made by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and his supporters that Britain conducted “mass surveillance”. “GCHQ is not collecting or reading everyone’s emails,” she said. “They do not have the legal authority, resources or the technical capability.”
An evidence session last October recorded Ms Blears asking Isabella Sankey, the director of policy for Liberty, whether she would change her mind if there were evidence showing that bulk data collection had helped to prevent terrorist plots. Ms Sankey was quoted as saying: “No.”
She was asked by a second committee member whether “you believe so strongly that bulk interception is unacceptable in a free society that you would say that was a price we should be willing to pay?” Ms Sankey was quoted as responding: “Yes.”
Also present at the hearing were Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, Eric Metcalfe, of Justice, and Hanne Stevens, the interim director of Rights Watch UK. When Ms Blears asked whether Ms Sankey’s colleagues shared that view, Ms Carr said: “Yes.”
The bulk interception of internet data — emails, web posts, YouTube chats, texts and any other digital communication — was a focus of the inquiry.
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Ms Blears said that she and other committee members, who were given access to thousands of classified documents, were told of cases that she said demonstrated that such interception had exposed threats and plots.
Ms Sankey said the committee had not shown any evidence that mass surveillance saved lives.
One of the relatives of the 2005 London bombing victims said, however, that the civil rights campaigners had their priorities wrong. “The question that should be asked is, what’s the minimum interference in our freedom that gives us maximum protection?” said Graham Foulkes, whose son David, 22, was killed. “Liberty is isolated from the real world. Because it is so lauded and courted by politicians, it has lost sense of what it’s all about.”
Ray McClure, the uncle of Lee Rigby, the soldier murdered by Islamists, said that privacy groups were protecting terrorists and that their comments showed “how little they value life”.