Privacy and civil liberties campaigners have accused David Cameron, the British prime minister, of “cynically exploiting” last week’s attacks in Paris to call for even more stringent counter-terrorism and surveillance powers than those already being controversially pushed through parliament.
Speaking earlier this week, Cameron pledged to give British security services greater capabilities to monitor and read online communications, and said countries such as the UK and France were facing a “fanatical death cult of Islamist extremist violence.”
“The attacks in Paris once again demonstrated the scale of the terrorist threat that we face and we have to have robust powers ... to keep our people safe,” he said. “The powers that I believe we need, whether on communications data or on the content of communications, I am very comfortable they are absolutely right for a modern liberal democracy.”
Cameron’s comments followed last week’s speech by Andrew Parker, director general of the UK’s MI5 intelligence agency, warning the security services’ ability to protect the country risked being compromised unless they were granted “powerful capabilities” to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists’ online communications.
But they also came as a parliamentary human rights committee called on the government to rethink elements of its current counter-terrorism and security bill, which some civil liberties groups have said will subject Muslim communities to “Orwellian” levels of surveillance.
‘Scary’ proposals
But internet privacy advocates reacted with scepticism and alarm, and questioned whether effective monitoring of encrypted online communication services such as Whatsapp or Snapchat was even achievable.
Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said Cameron’s proposals were “dangerous, ill-thought out and scary.”
“On Sunday David Cameron marched for freedom of expression in France. It is grimly ironic that the immediate government response to an attack on freedom of speech is to curb our civil liberties,” Killock told Al Jazeera.
“After an attack like the appalling Paris murders, the general public are at their most sympathetic to the work of the security services. But this sympathy should not be exploited to increase powers that threaten everyone’s liberty.”
Those concerns were echoed by Christopher Graham, the government’s own information commissioner, who said: “We need cool heads to analyse carefully what information the security services had access to and how they used it before necessarily concluding that we must give them access to more and more of our private information.
“We must avoid knee-jerk reactions. In particular, I am concerned about any compromising of effective encryption for consumers of online services.”
Muslim concerns
Muslim rights groups also expressed anger with the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) on Tuesday announcing it would no longer participate in government consultations in protest at the counter-terrorism and security bill currently being scrutinised by parliament.
On Monday, the parliamentary joint committee on human rights said proposed measures to temporarily exclude British citizens abroad from returning to the UK for up to two years, intended to mitigate the potential threat posed by returnees from Syria, risked violating their human rights, and raised concerns about the implications for free speech of proposals to silence so-called extremist preachers.