SurveillanceDirector of U.K. intelligence spiritedly defends surveillance programs

The chief of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, said last week that recent leaks of government surveillance capabilities had given “the advantage to the terrorists.”

In his 8 October 2013 speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Andrew Parker, who was director of the agency’s counterterrorism division during the London bombings in July 2005, rejected the “utter nonsense” of claims that British surveillance agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) listened in on “everyone and all their communications.”

The New York Times reports that Parker said he wanted to assure Britons that all surveillance was tightly controlled. “Far from being gratuitous harvesters of private information, in practice we focus our work very carefully and tightly against those who intend harm,” He said. Insisting that proper safeguards are exercised to protect innocent citizens, “the reality of intelligence work in practice is that we only focus the most intense intrusive attention on a small number of cases at any one time,” he said.

Parker said that MI5 anticipates one or two major terrorism attempts in Britain every year. He cited the recent Westgate Mall bombing in Nairobi, Kenya and the civil war in Syria as evidence that terrorism had become less predictable. “Threats are diversifying, but not diminishing,” he said.

Parker’s speech is the most seeping defense to date of Britain’s counterterrorism and surveillance policies by a government official.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, the newspaper which published many of Edward Snowden’s leaked documents, said Parker’s remarks were the kind of comments expected from an intelligence official. “But MI5 can’t be the only voice in this debate,” Rusbridger told the BBC. The intelligence services “will say that’s the haystack, they need that and they will look for needles in extremely controlled circumstances,” Rusbridger said. “The question is: Who gets the oversight of that? There has to be a wider debate.”

Parker pointed to the conflict in Syria as a source of producing new threats, with extremist Islamist groups planning to attack Western targets. Still, he noted, al Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan and Yemen are “the more direct and immediate threats” to Britain. MI5 is monitoring British and, more generally, Western citizens who travel to Syria to fight and then return to the West.

Parker said that between the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States and the end of March 2013, 330 people have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses in Britain, and that 121 of them are still in prison. Of the 121, 75 percent are British citizens.

Parker said that “What we know about the terrorists, and the detail of the capabilities we use against them, together represent our margin of advantage. That margin gives us the prospect of being able to detect their plots and stop them. But that margin is under attack.”