SurveillanceElectronic surveillance a “small price to pay” in fight against terror: Historian
British author and journalist Max Hastings told the Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club on Wednesday that terrorism will continue to cast a shadow over future generations, and government electronic surveillance is a small price to pay to combat it. Hastings offered a robust defense of electronic intelligence-gathering in what he called a new world tin which absolute security is unattainable.
British author and journalist Max Hastings told the Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club on Wednesday that terrorism will continue to cast a shadow over future generations, and government electronic surveillance is a small price to pay to combat it.
The FCC says that Hastings offered a robust defense of electronic intelligence-gathering in what he called a new world tin which absolute security is unattainable.
“Our tolerance of electronic surveillance, subject to legal and parliamentary oversight, seems a small price to pay for some measure of security against threats that nobody — today of all days — can doubt are real,” Hastings said.
Hastings, a former war correspondent and newspaper editor, is author of twenty-six books mostly on military history.
His latest, The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-1945, tells the story of behind-the-scenes intelligence operations in the Second World War.
Future wars “will almost certainly” be fought on similar turf.
“Whereas a few generations ago our forebears were defended by Spitfires and citizen armies, today intelligence services and eavesdroppers at GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters, the U.K. signal intelligence agency] are at the front line against our enemies.”
The GCHQ monitors vast amounts of e-mail and other electronic traffic in search of suspicious communications.
Hastings said he found it “almost incredible” that civil libertarians objected so strongly.
“Personal liberty never has been and never can be an absolute,” he said, adding a balance must be struck between individual rights and the need to protect society.
In Britain’s case, electronic interception was the only major way to detect terrorists.
“It is almost impossibly difficult for agents to penetrate Muslim communities in Britain and MI5 [Britain’s domestic intelligence service] receives dismayingly little help from them.”
Hastings pointed out that the detection of 20-30 major plots in Britain in the past decade came overwhelmingly from electronic interception.
He added that Edward Snowden had done great harm. There was clear evidence since the revelations that terrorists were using much more sophisticated encryption systems, he noted.
Rather than electronic snooping, Hastings said he was far more worried about the use of drones and targeted killing by the United States, Britain, and Israel.
“It’s a very, very dangerous business to delegate to government (the power) to act unilaterally without any judicial process at all to just kill whoever they feel like.”
