Few would argue that the police and intelligence agencies should be above criticism. When (not if) bombs go off or people are killed in atrocious ways, it is right that questions are asked about systems and specifics: what was known? What was done?
As we all know, in 2001 the United States suffered the worst terrorist attacks in history. The Commission set up to investigate the attacks reported that the US failed, in many different ways and for many different reasons, to respond adequately to the looming threat from Al Qaida, even though clues were there.
It is now commonplace for terrorist attacks in the West, whether in France or Britain or the US, to be followed by a blame game in which the most urgent question seems to be: were the perpetrators on the radar? And if so, how did they slip through the net? Who dropped the ball? Did someone fail to join the dots? These simplistic metaphors, however, often reveal a lack of insight into how intelligence works and what it is for.
A monumental challenge
The police and agencies face a monumental challenge—in terms of the scale and complexity of the threat, the volumes of data available to them, and the terrorists’ growing power to conceal their activity. We know that MI5 have 3,000 “subjects of interest” in terrorist investigations and a further 23,000 on record in terrorist cases.In only a handful of cases will the police and MI5 be able to mount a comprehensive, intensive investigation. Even if the police and agencies received a massive, unprecedented injection of money and people, intelligence resources will still need to be ruthlessly prioritised to ensure that the coverage is allocated to the cases where the threat is judged to be greatest.
Compare today’s threat with the one many in the UK grew up with. The IRA was a small organisation: most estimates put it at less than a thousand active members, most of whom were based in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. It operated in a fairly disciplined manner under leaders well-known to the authorities. It was subjected to a massive police, military and intelligence operation. In Northern Ireland, it had to work in the most heavily surveilled territory in Western Europe.
And yet, over a period of 27 years, it still carried out over 1,700 murders, as well as bombings in London and Manchester that caused damage costed in the hundreds of millions of pounds.
21st century challenges
Twentieth-century intelligence work was not exactly easy but it did not have to contend with the challenges of the digital revolution. We now have a paradoxical situation where the agencies can have, at the same time, too much information and too little.The quantities of data potentially available on 3,000 "subjects of interest" will be vast, and far greater than can be read and judged individually by human investigators. Meanwhile, the ability of terrorists to hide their communications behind encryption, and to stay one step ahead by using a wide range of platforms, means that the agencies are in a version of the ‘Red Queen Game’ from Alice in Wonderland: they have to run faster and faster to stay still.
Their job is to sort the signal from the noise, but what is judged to be noise today may acquire much greater significance in hindsight.
Not just joining the dots
In a digital world, it no longer makes sense to think of intelligence work as an exercise in joining dots or tracking blips on a radar screen. And it makes no sense to assume that knowing something about someone automatically means that they can be stopped if they go on to plan and mount an attack, especially as one can be on the radar for years before something happens.What matters is the rate of success: if more plots are foiled than get through, the police and agencies must be doing a fairly good job at prioritising the right cases.
If we accept that some attacks will get through, we should also accept that, when this happens, the authorities will probably know something about the attacker.
This was true with the IRA in the analogue age and it is even more true of Al Qaida, ISIL and their sympathisers today in the digital age.
When attacks take place, it is right that investigations and enquiries examine what happened in order to make improvements. But we should not rush to judgement, and knowledge of an individual should not be seen necessarily as evidence of failure.
The police and intelligence agencies can only operate with consent and support from the public. Blaming them unfairly for doing their job will erode that support and make us all less safe.
