Tuesday 17 November 2015 8:55 pm

Paris terror attacks: There’s no case for rushing in illiberal snooping laws in the new surveillance bill

Lest my position on current events be misunderstood, let me restate a basic truth I’ve set out in these pages before. Killing terrorists is good. However, achieving that desirable end does not mean that the state needs to become more powerful. Nor does it mean that the state should snoop on all of us, “just in case”.

Lord Carlile QC, former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, disagrees. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, he has argued that recent events mean that Parliament should fast-track the government’s new surveillance legislation, the Investigatory Powers Bill, into law. He tried this argument not once but twice in the last Parliament while advancing the “snooper’s charter” – in 2013, for example, he used the killing of Lee Rigby to claim that the soldier’s murder should “haunt” Nick Clegg.

It’s pretty astonishing that Carlile was ever regarded as “independent”. The Snowden leaks showed that GCHQ coordinated with the Home Office in 2009 to line up “talking heads” such as Carlile to defend the use of intercept evidence. His role as tubthumper-in-chief for further powers for the intelligence services has continued since (coincidentally, he’s earned £400,000 from a private consultancy he co-founded with a former head of MI6 in 2012).

But even notwithstanding Carlile’s impartial point of view, powerfully coupled with public anger and the desperate desire for “something to be done”, it is hard to see how mass surveillance would have helped to prevent the Paris atrocities beforehand or to solve them afterwards, when the Paris gunmen were already on the radar of the French intelligence services. Just as Lee Rigby’s killers were known to the British authorities. The Charlie Hebdo shooters were known to the French authorities. The Boston bombers were known to the Americans. Indeed, in every major terrorist attack in the West in recent years, the perpetrators were already known to the authorities.

Equally, France already had the kind of state surveillance powers that Carlile and the rest of the UK securocrat lobby are urging for. Sadly, the Paris murders still took place. Claiming that having measures that France had already would prevent what happened in Paris from happening here is so plainly illogical that only the raw emotion of current events permits people to take that position without criticism or ridicule.

None of those calling for more powers for the security services can explain how their garnering more powers, or Parliament retrospectively legitimating the snooping they do already, would actually prevent atrocities. Good surveillance is targeted and proportionate – it is specific to actual concerns and can be warranted, authorised, by a judge or even a minister. Bad surveillance tries to watch all of us, all the time, “just in case”. We’re presently going for the latter.

This is the kind of rational and objective analysis that needs to be conducted. The instinct that “something must be done” is all too natural. We are hurting, and we want to feel like someone is acting against those who caused the pain. But as we know, from the Dangerous Dogs Act to random Stop and Search to the aftermath of the Birmingham and Guildford bombings, the “something” introduced in a kneejerk legislative environment can often go on to cause even greater problems. In truth, even if all I’ve set out here is wrong and ultimately our security services do indeed need more powers, it is simply too early to say whether the Paris attacks suggest that any legal change in the UK would help – and it is sheer opportunism to suggest otherwise.

So it is good to see the home secretary Theresa May resisting requests from Labour’s Andy Burnham to rush the “snooper’s charter” through Parliament. While acceleration will not help our intelligence agencies, or the detection of terrorism, it may undermine the fate of the Bill. Burnham’s macho chestbeating is perhaps an understandable over-reaction to his leader’s cackhanded position, but that does nothing to make it more rational.

But to the final objection of the scoundrel – “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” – that can be rebutted with recent examples on both the widespread and specific levels. Widespread: that’s what TalkTalk customers thought. Specific: that’s what Nick Gargan, former chief constable of Avon and Somerset, might have thought, before a vindictive investigation into him, having failed to turn up anything by conventional means, resorted to RIPA legislation meant for terrorist plots to find saucy text messages stored on his phone. Hence him now being the ex-chief constable. If they can do it to a serving chief constable, they can do it to you. If you’ve got nothing to hide, why do you have curtains?

As a society, we would do well to resist what legal commentator David Allen Green has termed the Carlile Doctrine: “any act of terrorism will justify more legal powers for security forces, regardless of what it is.”