PM Cameron's Plans To Monitor Encrypted Messages ‘Would Turn UK Into China’
Nicholas Watt in Washington
Thursday 15 January 2015 21.09 EST
A better-quality debate needs to be held on state surveillance powers, David Cameron has said after the conservative-leaning Spectator magazine warned that Britain is in danger of ending up like China and Russia where encrypted communications are banned.
The prime minister, who was speaking in Washington before he opened two days of talks with Barack Obama over dinner at the White House last night, called for a raising of the quality of debate in the wake of the Spectator article.
Cameron spoke out after the Spectator challenged his plans to create a legal framework to allow the intelligence agencies to break into the encrypted communications of terror suspects on the grounds that the Paris attackers were working on their own.
The Spectator wrote: “If anything, the trend in terrorism is towards more lone-wolf attacks. It is far from clear how they can be countered, but one thing is for sure: it is not through surveillance. Unless in the habit of talking to themselves, lone wolves have not much need to communicate their plans.”
The prime minister said: “We have a very robust system. The public would expect us to be able, in extremis, under the law with all these conditions in place to be able to try to prevent terrorist outrages … If you read the Spectator this week there is an assertion that because we are dealing with line wolf attacks, lone wolves don’t communicate with anybody and so all these powers are meaningless. That is so far off the truth … we need to up the quality of the debate.”
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/16/david-cameron-plan-monitor-encrypted-messages-challenge
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