Britain's Intel Chief: Our Spies Would Rather Quit Than Do Mass Surveillance

GCHQ Director Sir Iain Lobban has continued to equivocate and dissimulate around the issue of surveillance in his valedictory speech, which he gave today ahead of his retirement at the end of this week.

Though the British intelligence agency is the NSA's closest foreign partner in defending the West from critical threats to national security, Lobban neither mentioned Edward Snowden nor directly addressed the many allegations of mass snooping that have recently been levelled at the organisations. Instead, he chose to talk up the agency's work against paedophiles, drug cartels, and terrorists, whilst defending GCHQ as a bastion of liberty.

However Snowden, the ex-NSA contractor who exposed the epic surveillance operations of intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, can't have been far from Lobban's mind. "The people who work at GCHQ would sooner walk out the door than be involved in anything remotely resembling 'mass surveillance," Lobban said.

But then Lobban described some of the work the agency carries out in a way many would deem as resembling exactly that. "We access the internet at scale so as to dissect it with surgical precision," he said during his speech at the Churchill War Rooms in London. "You can't pick and choose the components of a global interception system that you like—catching terrorists and paedophiles—and those you don't—incidental collection of data at scale: it's one integrated system."

He claimed only a small percentage of global communications are within reach of the agency's sensors and GCHQ only intercepts a small percentage of that. And of the data it intercepts, it stores only a "miniscule" amount for a limited period of time.

But Professor Ross Anderson, a long-time critic of the UK's intelligence operations and head of cryptography at the University of Cambridge, said over email that Lobban's definition of 'mass surveillance' is "nothing like yours or mine."

"How come they collected over a million people's Yahoo video chats, including a significant number of intimate chats?" Anderson asked. "There is no conceivable way that can be justified as targeted, proportionate or necessary. It fails the human rights test. It is mass surveillance."

Lobban's claim that the Cheltenham-based agency only collected and stored a small percentage of people's internet traffic was "totally and deliberately misleading," Anderson told me. "GCHQ's value to the NSA is that about 30 percent of the internet passes through the UK and its former colonies (from Gibraltar to Oman) where we can collect it for the Yanks."

The GCHQ director is likely using the word "intercept" to describe the point when a human listens to or watches the content. What he didn't address is the fact that the collection of significant amounts of people's data could arguably be illegal.

The government and its spies have continued to claim that simply collecting the data in no way intrudes on people's privacy. But that's not what international and European law has said for decades, said Professor Ian Brown, associate director of Oxford University's Cyber Security Centre and Professor of Information Security and Privacy.

"The European Court of Human Rights has been saying since 1970 that collecting data in itself engages people's right to privacy," Brown told me. "There are all sorts of circumstances where it's justified but it seems a real waste of time for [the government] to keep coming back to this point that just because they collect all this data there's no privacy implication until a human being actually looks at it… That's a very misleading starting point."

Many think GCHQ's surveillance operations could be illegal. UK privacy groups, including the Open Rights Group and Big Brother Watch, have claimed in their complaint to the European Court of Human Rights that mass or blanket surveillance contravenes Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which should guarantee the rights to private and family lives, as well as the right to freedom of expression.

Just last month, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism asked the court to rule on whether UK law adequately protects journalists' sources and communications from mass surveillance.

In the US, Obama's surveillance review panel suggested the NSA should do far more targeted collection rather than wide-scale hoovering up of data. But as the US administration at least acts like it cares, the UK government and its GCHQ underlings will continue to either say nothing at all on the issue or redefine language to make it appear its actions are legal.

The word that is most argued over here, "liberty," is one that GCHQ loves to use to its own advantage. Lobban said in his speech that GCHQ's mission is to protect liberty, not erode it.

"Presumably their definition of liberty is their liberty to do what they want," said Anderson.