The head of the United Kingdom’s Security Service, colloquially known as MI5 and the British domestic counterterror and counterintelligence agency, gave one of his occasional public speeches yesterday and laid out the terrorist threats Britain faces. He noted that Islamic terrorism remains a consistent threat around the world, but issued a surprisingly direct warning about the risk from jihadist groups fighting Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria right now, some of which are linked to al-Qaeda. They don’t match the theat of core al-Qaeda yet, he said, but it’s a growing problem:
Al Qaida and its affiliates in South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula present the most direct and immediate threats to the UK. For the future, there is good reason to be concerned about Syria. A growing proportion of our casework now has some link to Syria, mostly concerning individuals from the UK who have travelled to fight there or who aspire to do so. Al Nusrah and other extremist Sunni groups there aligned with Al Qaida aspire to attack Western countries.
He did say more broadly, ”Overall, I do not believe the terrorist threat is worse now than before. But it is more diffuse. More complicated. More unpredictable.” He also obliquely condemned the recent leaks of intelligence information by American Edward Snowden (an associate of whose, the partner of Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, was recently detained in Britain for trying to leave the country with reams of highly classified British-government documents):
What we know about the terrorists, and the detail of the capabilities we use against them together represent our margin of advantage. That margin gives us the prospect of being able to detect their plots and stop them. But that margin is under attack. Reporting from GCHQ [the British counterpart to the NSA] is vital to the safety of this country and its citizens. GCHQ intelligence has played a vital role in stopping many of the terrorist plots that MI5 and the police have tackled in the past decade. We are facing an international threat and GCHQ provides many of the intelligence leads upon which we rely. It makes a vital contribution to most of our high priority investigations. It causes enormous damage to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques. Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists. It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will. Unfashionable as it might seem, that is why we must keep secrets secret, and why not doing so causes such harm.