generalspeaking

Right to Know Imperils Security

"Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists. It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will.
"Unfashionable as it might seem, that is why we must keep secrets secret, and why not doing so causes such harm.
[The MI5 agencies' capabilities represented their] "margin of advantage" [over the fanatics].
"That margin gives us the prospect of being able to detect their plots and stop them. But that margin is under attack. 
"We are facing an international threat and GCHQ provides many of the intelligence leads upon which we rely. [MI5 was] "tackling threats on more fronts than ever before."
Andrew Parker, director general, British Security Service

The sheer scope of the problem at hand -- how to keep on top of the ongoing situation of plots against the safety and security of British government installations and civil environment, let alone the lives of countless civilians unaware of the threats that lurk in the background of an underworld they may not even suspect exists -- where the country's intelligence agencies must use all means at their resource-potentials to succeed in apprehending plots before they occur.

Britain had its own 9/11 in the attack on its public transit system in July 2005. Having suffered through such a dreadful assault is in and of itself adequate reason to ensure no further attacks occur. Several have, since that dreadful occasion. But far more have been apprehended before their plotters were able to mount them, because intelligence was capable of discerning and picking up the clues of an imminent attack, enabling those involved to be arrested.

File photo: Wikimedia Commons

The files that were published by The Guardian, thanks to the dispersal of classified and secret government intelligence by Edward Snowden who fled the United States knowing he was about to betray his country and its allies by distributing those files for public view, had potential devastating results. Results that might not yet be visible, but which over time may prove to have been extremely useful to the very terror threats that the activities of secret service agencies work to disarm.

Exposing intelligence techniques, he stated, had the potential to provide fanatics with the information they require to evade the spy agencies. Britain, said the new head of MI5, faced its gravest threat of terrorism at the present time and that would include the "several thousand" Islamist extremists living in Britain. Who conspire to attack other countries, and who will eventually turn their attacks upon Britain as well, when their attention abroad has waned and they look elsewhere to complete their hateful agenda of terror and conquest.

He characterized the leaked material published openly and available to anyone completing a basic search and perhaps reading between the lines, as a "guidebook for terrorists". The very fact that this situation exists underlines in bold black the harm done by a conspirator who imagines himself performing a public good. Edward Snowden's self-satisfied explanation that he felt it his duty to reveal what his government was doing, so that everyone would be aware of activities he felt to be inimical to human rights and peace, revealed a complacent sanctimony.

A state of being that obviates the very imagination that there is someone who thought long and hard before committing himself to lifting those countless reams of protected security documents with the intention of dispersing them to news media eager to make a splash of their scoops embarrassing government. If all it did was embarrass government that wouldn't be so serious, but what it does, as the new director of MI5 points out, is compromise the capability of an agency such as his to duly protect the population of a country from terrorist activities.

The very fact that within Britain live thousands of people whose sinister ideology posing as a legitimate religious inheritance of the faithful to obey the edict of jihad having to be embarked upon as a religious obligation, should in and of itself have given anyone with an ounce of common sense, pause for serious thought. That would include the individual who embarked on the mission to reveal secret documents for the 'greater good' as he saw it, and the voracious appetite of an unscrupulous news media which resisted government pleas not to publish the purloined documents.

Adequate responsibility, principle and caution appears to be lacking on both counts.

Labels: Britain, Intelligence, Islamism, Terrorism

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, October 10, 2013