Intel chief: Force social-media firms to hand over chatter

MI5 headquarters

The head of the United Kingdom’s MI5 domestic national security agency, the counterpart to America’s FBI, says tech companies should alert authorities when they see any threatening exchanges within their networks.

The conflict between the government’s interest in security and citizens’ right to privacy is also a major issue in the United States at the moment. In the U.K., there are talks of expanding government authority, while in the U.S., the National Security Agency’s spy-on-Americans program has been challenged in court.

MI5 Director-General Andrew Parker recently granted a rare interview to the BBC in which he said that in an age of rapid technological advances, features such as encryption enable hackers to wreak havoc with immunity.

Parker said some social media companies “operate arrangements for their own purposes under their codes of practice which cause them to close accounts sometimes because of what is carried.”

“I think there is then a question about why not come forward,” he said. “If it is something that concerns terrorism or concerns child sex exploitation or some other appalling area of crime, why would a company not come forward?”

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The BBC reported Parker told the network’s “Today” program that it’s getting harder to obtain information from online networks.

Consequently, he said,  there is an “ethical responsibility” for tech companies to inform authorities of anything perceived as a potential threat.

Parker described having prevented six terrorist attacks in the U.K. over the last year but provided no details.

But he said the government isn’t capable of monitoring communication traffic on a large scale.

“We do not have population-scale monitoring, or anything like that. We are focused, on behalf of the public, against those who mean us harm,” he said.

He said it’s just a fact that terrorists live and run their operations through the smart phones in their pockets, just like anyone else.

“If we are to find and stop [terrorists], we need to be able to navigate the Internet to find terrorists’ communications,” he said.

He continued, “It’s to nobody’s interest that terrorists should be able to communicate out of the reach of authorities.”

Parker said companies have an ethical responsibility.

The tech blog Gizmodo said Parker wants social media and Internet firms “to be forced to comply with all data requests, and is trying to steer the government toward putting such legislation into place.”

The issue recently has attracted the attention of citizens groups, members of Congress, privacy organizations and others in the U.S.

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the government’s National Security Agency has been running vast sweeping programs that snatch “metadata” from cell-phone calls.

A lawsuit over the privacy violations resulted, and a federal judge found the program likely unconstitutional.

Calling the phone-snooping program “almost Orwellian,” Judge Richard Leon granted a preliminary injunction, temporarily halting the spying. The injunction was put on hold until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned it.

But on Wednesday, Leon approved attorney Larry Klayman’s effort to keep the lawsuit alive by filing an amended complaint with new plaintiffs.

Klayman has explained the issue: “Such broad and intrusive collections and surveillance tactics, without regard to any showing of probable cause, much less a reasonable suspicion of communications with terrorists or the commission of another crime, directly violate the U.S. Constitution and also federal laws, including, but not limited to, the … breach of privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association and the due process rights of American citizens.”

Two of America’s influential civil-rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have sided with Klayman.

The data that the NSA collects, they explained in a brief, “reveals political affiliation, religious practices and peoples’ most intimate associations.”

“It reveals who calls a suicide prevention line and who calls their elected official; who calls the local tea-party office and who calls Planned Parenthood.”

What do you know about America’s friends across the pond? All you need is here, in “The Politically Incorrect Guide to The British Empire.”

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