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A Democratic Licence to Operate
often framed as not just diverse but, in an age of rapid globalisation and extensive crossborder travel, increasingly international. They can also develop and diminish rapidly;
in the five years since the National Security Strategy was published, a range of global
events continue to demonstrate this volatility; as Sir John Sawers, former chief of SIS
expresses it, ‘we have to anticipate, discover, analyse, investigate and respond, and we
have to do it globally because the threats are coming at us globally’.24
2.27
These new threats can emanate from states and non-state actors and often manifest
themselves in frequent, lower-level and less-sophisticated attacks, which are much
harder for intelligence agencies to detect and disrupt. In addition to the murder of
Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013, so-called ‘lone actor’ terrorist attacks over the course
of the last two years in Copenhagen, Ottawa, Paris and Sydney are examples of this
type of threat. The attack by a lone individual on British tourists in Tunisia in June 2015
caused the highest number of British casualties since the attack on the London transport
system in 2005.
2.28
The terrorist threat is diverse and takes a number of different forms – from Islamist to
extreme right-wing ideologies, and from established groups to self-organised individuals
(‘spontaneous and volatile extremists’). At the time of writing, the threat level for
terrorism in the UK is Severe and is strongly influenced by British nationals returning to
the UK having fought in the Syrian civil war, the scale of which, in terms of the number of
British foreign fighters, is unprecedented. Given the diversity of the terrorist threat, the
police and SIAs have all had to adapt their approach and capabilities. MI5, for example,
has experienced a substantial period of growth and the organisation is double the size it
was at the time of the 2005 London bombings.25
2.29
The Internet is already used by terrorists to spread propaganda, radicalise potential
supporters, raise funds, communicate and plan attacks. While terrorists can be expected
to continue to favour high-profile physical attacks, the threat that they might also use
the Internet to facilitate or to mount attacks against the UK is growing.26 The influence
of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is spreading and social media is a useful
propaganda tool for the organisation, particularly in encouraging lone actors. The director
of GCHQ described the array of threats, and the degree to which terrorists and criminals
are using technology to their benefit, in more stark terms in the Financial Times. He
wrote that technology companies ‘have become the command-and-control networks
of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as
the rest of us.’27
24. Evidence submitted at the ISC open evidence session, 7 November 2013.
25. To provide a comparative scale, however, the scale of their operations remains just 1 per
cent of that of the East German Stasi in terms of GDP per capita.
26. Cabinet Office, ‘The UK Cyber Security Strategy: Protecting and Promoting the UK in a
Digital World’, 2011.
27. Robert Hannigan, ‘The Web is a Terrorist’s Command-and-Control Network of Choice’,
Financial Times, 3 November 2014.