Britse geheime dienst verdedigt massaal bespioneren Europeanen (en)

BRUSSELS - The head of UK spy agency GCHQ, Iain Lobban, has said media revelations of mass surveillance have made it harder to catch terrorists.

“We’ve seen terrorists groups in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere in south Asia, discussing the revelations in specific terms,” he told a hearing at the British parliament in London on Thursday (7 November).

He said the past five months of global media coverage on leaks by former US spy contractor Edward Snowden have made his job “far, far harder for years to come.”

Lobban, along with the heads of the UK's internal and feign intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, was queried for 90 minutes by the parliament’s intelligence and security committee.

He defended GCHQ's methods, which are said to include tapping undersea cables which carry internet and phone traffic.

His so-called Tempura operation is reported to suck up 21 petabytes of data each day, before storing it in a central database, sifting it, and sharing the results with its US equivalent, the NSA.

Other Snowden revelations say GCHQ and the NSA have introduced "back doors" or bugs into commercial software designed to protect banking and commerce from cyber thieves.

His actions have been described by privacy advocates, such as the London-based NGO, Privacy International, as creating a "new Wild West" on the web.

But Lobban noted that he needs a "ring of secrecy" to do his work and insisted that he operates within British law and does no harm to ordinary European citizens.

He described the internet as an “enormous hay field” used by terrorists to plot their attacks.

“We are very, very well aware that within that haystack there is going to be plenty of hay which is innocent communication, innocent people, not just British,” he noted.

He said that none of his 6,000 employees spy on ordinary people. “If they were asked to snoop, I would not have them in the work force. They’d leave the building,” he added.

For his part, David Bickford, the legal director of MI5 and MI6 from 1986 to 1995, told MEPs in a parallel hearing in Brussels the same day that British parliamentary oversight is "not adequate."

Bickford also noted that American and British spies must have the means to fight criminals who have "access to the most sophisticated forms of communication."

He resisted calls by Privacy International for a "root and branch" reform of intelligence laws, saying "if the number of regulations proliferate … you will stifle the agencies and you will not be protected."

But he poured scorn on the current British oversight regime, in which covert operations are authorised by government ministers who make decisions under political "pressure," while MPs look into some cases of abuse "ex post facto."

He said European countries should instead adopt the French oversight model, in which judges weight the needs of national security against people's rights "at the coal face" of ongoing operations.

"There is never going to be a panacea. But the adoption of the French system, the examining judge system, allows intelligence agencies to do their work while limiting the margins for abuse," he noted.

Meanwhile, a new study by seven academics says that British, Dutch, French, German and Swedish snooping violates the EU Treaty, as well as the EU Charter of Fundamental Values and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.

It also says that EU agencies, such as the joint police body, Europol, and the EU foreign service's intelligence-sharing branch, IntCen, are most likely using data "stolen" from European citizens.

"It's no longer credible to say the EU has no legal competence and should do nothing on this," one of the authors, Sergio Carrera, a Spanish jurist, told the EU parliament enquiry.

He urged MEPs to block an EU-US free trade agreement unless the US and EU countries disclose the full nature of their surveillance activities.

He also said MEPs should push EU countries to draft a "professional code for the transnational management of data," to stop internet firms from giving data to spies, to protect whistleblowers like Snowden and to set up a permanent, EU-level intelligence oversight body.

The idea that espionage is a national prerogative has been used by British and Dutch authorities to deflect EU queries into the scandal.

The British ambassador to the EU, John Cunliffe, in a letter to the EU parliament last month - seen by EUobserver - said the GCHQ's Lobban, had no obligation to answer MEPs' questions because "national security is the sole responsibility of member states."