Britain's new head of its electronic surveillance body GCHQ, Robert Hannigan stepped on a hornets' nest when he asserted this week that the big tech companies dominating the digital platform provide the "command-and-control network of choice for terrorists and criminals". Hannigan added that the radical Muslim terror group Isis "grew up on the Internet" and "exploiting the power of the web to create a jihadi threat with near-global reach." He argued democratic governments and big tech companies needed to come to a "new deal" to help combat that kind of terrorism and protect everybody else in the world.
Much of what he said was stating the obvious and is therefore patently correct. Terrorists are using the most sophisticated technology available to operate. Of course they are, why wouldn’t they? Because they use such technologies does not make those technologies in themselves or those who manage them complicit in the crimes they commit as long as they report and act on any law-breaking that they come across or that is reported to them.
It must be remembered that tech companies, through the services they offer across the globe, are also a huge force for good in spreading democracy, in helping organise mass protest against authority and as a tool in education and information gathering by private citizens.
The other part of Hannigan’s argument – that the providers of the technology we use in our everyday lives should open the doors to the world’s big spy agencies – must be resisted. If anything, as new technologies become so embedded in our everyday lives, big tech companies need to (now more than ever) demonstrate that their assurances of privacy can be trusted. The suspicion is that these assurances are not worth very much.
Indeed, our Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, reacting to reports last year that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone was being tapped by American intelligence agencies, said he always operates on the basis that his phone calls are being listened to by third parties. He is not alone.
The big tech companies – Facebook, Google and others – have a lot to prove to their customers in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations of mass surveillance by both GCHQ and its American counterpart the NSA of huge volumes of both live and historic data, including emails, photographs and other communication data.
Equally, every genuine effort must be made to combat terrorism on and offline. Nobody would argue that every available technology should be deployed to detect and combat law-breaking, particularly on a global scale. But if we were to say that violent jihadists were increasingly using houses to sleep in and hold recruitment meetings and therefore intelligence agents needed to strike a new deal with house builders in order to allow access to what was going on inside, people would rightly say this was a gross invasion of privacy on a grand scale.
So it is with technology. Security agencies must be able to do their jobs and patrol the “streets” of the Internet without opening our front doors or peering in our windows just in case we are about to do something wrong.
Any powers afforded to governments to listen into our private communications must be administered under a legal framework upheld by democratic governments and not as part of some “deal” between faceless tech giants and shadowy spy agencies. To circumvent due legal process in the name of protecting the world is to circumvent democracy itself.
So before we start talking about a "new deal" for access to our private information, perhaps Hannigan and his spy friends in the United States will come clean on what the "old deal" has been because, paranoia aside, there is a basic lack of trust between ordinary law abiding people on the one hand and big tech companies and surveillance agencies on the other.
Patrick Logue is Home Page Editor
