14 DAY TRIAL // It doesn’t seem like the British intelligence community wants to leave their US counterparts flounder around on their own.
Andrew Parker, director of the MI5, has taken to the media to express how much damage reports based on the Snowden files can cause.
“What we know about the terrorists and the details of the capabilities we use against them together represent our margin of advantage. That margin gives us the prospect of being able to detect their plots and stop them,” Parker said.
“But that margin is under attack. GCHQ intelligence has played a vital role in stopping many of the terrorist plots that MI5 and the police have tackled in the past decade. It causes enormous damage to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques. Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists,” he says, basically echoing the statements made by US intelligence leaders.
However, Parker seems to be one of the first higher ups that offer any insight into how the intelligence apparatus actually works, The Independent reports.
“The law requires that we only collect and access information that we really need to perform our functions. In some quarters there seems to be a vague notion that we monitor everyone and all their communications, browsing at will through peoples’ private lives for anything that looks interesting. That is, of course, utter nonsense,” he says.
Parker says that knowing of an individual does not mean they know everything about that person. “Being on our radar does not necessarily mean being under our microscope: the reality of intelligence work in practice is that we only focus the most intense intrusive attention on a small number of cases at any time,” Parker stresses.
That being said, right now intelligence agencies and their officials aren’t all that trusted by people, not that they were before the Snowden leaks.