British Prime Minister Theresa May’s approach to intelligence is well-known and defined by her tenure as Home Secretary. While foreign intelligence technically falls into the remit of the Foreign Secretary, the policy and legal frameworks are generally administered by the Home Office.
The Home Office has – since 2010, when May was appointed Home Secretary – shaped May’s thinking and vice versa. She has been tough on the police for what she sees as poor performance and has taken stands against the abuse of the justice system, including refusing to extradite Gary McKinnon, whose hacking into U.S. military servers was balanced against his autism and mental state.
However, she has also had a reputation for authoritarianism and a lack of respect for human rights frameworks, which are arguably culturally embedded views of large parts of the Home Office. She has repeatedly attacked the European Convention on Human Rights and its court for decisions that she dislikes, particularly in relation to deportations. Recently, she went as far as saying that the UK should withdraw from the Convention (a position that she has taken back, now that she is Prime Minister). We should not assume that her hostility to the courts attempting to place limits on executive power has gone away.
Theresa May has – since 2010 – attempted to expand the ability of the police to mass monitor Internet activities. She revived plans shelved by the Labour Party to force the collection of UK citizens’ Internet histories, and to build analytic engines to query and sort it. This includes location data and call histories, creating a social graph and trail of physical associations of individuals that is unparalleled in the democratic world. However, the measure was blocked by her Liberal Democrat coalition partners – until 2015.
The plans are now part of the Investigatory Powers Bill, which consolidates the practice of UK security agencies – including powers to acquire and analyze information in ‘bulk,’ whether from cables, communications providers, or more general databases such as taxation records. The Bill also includes new powers to hack and to compel companies to build in back doors to listen into their customers’ electronic, and possibly encrypted, conversations.
The Bill is the most telling part of May’s reaction to the Snowden revelations. Rather than attempt to scale back surveillance activities, her approach has been to make the powers more explicit and to improve the oversight regime.
The implications of the Bill and the actual justifiability of the bulk collection powers that the Bill grants and mass surveillance of non-targets has been largely avoided, by May and the opposition. Only very recently have the powers and operational case been examined – yet this still sidesteps the ethical questions of allowing the state to possess such wide-ranging abilities.
This failure to get under the surface in large part reflects the realpolitik of electronic surveillance. The expenditure on UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) programs is enormous – believed to run at over £1 billion a year, swallowing the vast majority of the cash provided for UK intelligence.
The UK has a strategically useful position on the global map, with access to important overseas cables transporting data from Europe to the U.S. and the Middle East, from Mediterranean listening posts. This data is shared with the U.S. and other Five Eye countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand in addition to the United Kingdom) and is perhaps more extensive than would be allowed within U.S. law, giving the UK additional strategic importance to U.S. intelligence operations.
The Snowden documents also showed a high level of technological cooperation and sharing between the U.S. and the UK. The UK specializes not only in data acquisition, encryption, and bulk data analytics, but also in methods of hacking into devices such as mobile phones. The UK, however, also depends on U.S. technology such as XKeyscore, automated hacking tools, and access to more global Internet points that the U.S. provides.
The UK’s intelligence program is, therefore, hard to disentangle in policy and practical terms. Much like our nuclear and defense systems, the UK’s basic approach is to create influence with the U.S. through a close practical relationship. It is hard to imagine May trying to change this.
The difficulties posed by the UK’s vote to leave the European Union make this an even more tempting approach. As we heard with renewed commitments to NATO activities, the UK will be looking for new ways to project international power. Surveillance capabilities will surely be on the list.
Of course there are countervailing trends. Human rights courts are nervous about these powers and are finding it hard to reconcile them with the central tenet of proportionality. The House of Lords in the UK may be more skeptical about some of the oversight arrangements and attempt to ensure that they function. Politics, too, is unpredictable. However, May is canny enough to try to find ways to limit the impact of external forces while proceeding with her own invisible hand of the surveillance state.
