Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, Metropolitan police commissioner, says law enforcement must strike balance between security and privacy in wake of Snowden revelations

Law enforcement agencies lost the public’s trust after disclosures on government surveillance by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and must ensure that they strike the right balance between privacy and security, the UK’s most senior police officer said on Thursday.



Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, commissioner of the Metropolitan police in London, told a conference of senior American police chiefs that authorities must take care “post-Snowden” to use the most intrusive surveillance tools available to them “only where necessary”, or “risk losing them altogether”.

“We need to ensure that where law enforcement accesses private communications there is a process of authorisation, oversight and governance that gets the balance right between the individual’s right to privacy and their right to be protected from serious crime,” said Hogan-Howe, whose force that takes the lead on police counter-terrorism efforts in the UK.

Speaking at an event in New York on Thursday, Hogan-Howe told fellow chiefs including Bill Bratton, the commissioner of the New York police department: “There is work to be done to restore the public’s trust that we are acting in their best interests.”

The remarks appeared to contrast with more strident comments made by other senior British officials including David Cameron, the prime minister, who last year accused Snowden and newspapers such as the Guardian who published his disclosures of “helping our enemies”.

However, Hogan-Howe also used his speech to rail against an increase in online security and encryption that has followed the revelations from Snowden, a contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA) who leaked a cache of documents disclosing controversial electronic surveillance programs run there and at GCHQ, the NSA’s sister agency in the UK.

Authorities have complained bitterly in particular about the latest update to the operating system for Apple’s iPhones, which upgraded the encryption on users’ data so as to prevent it from being accessible for handing over to law enforcement agencies.

Hogan-Howe claimed that the internet was at risk of becoming a “dark and ungoverned space” because encryption and security measures on communications devices were now “beyond what any genuine domestic user could reasonably require”.

Bratton told a press conference afterwards that the Islamic State (Isis) were using “increasingly sophisticated recruiting efforts” such as social media and well-produced websites “to actively recruit and successively recruit” jihadists.

Hogan-Howe said that counter-terrorism officials in the UK were removing 1,000 pieces of “illegal content” from the web each week. “We cannot police the whole internet, but we will continue to do what we can.”

Stressing that 500 Britons had travelled to join the conflict in Iraq and Syria, the Met police chief said that the threat of these people returning as militarised jihadists must be dealt with. However he also said that recent isolated attacks on police and military personnel in New York and Canada highlighted the need to be watchful of so-called “lone wolf” attackers.

After telling the conference that “privacy is important”, Hogan-Howe was asked by the Guardian whether it was acceptable that British security agencies were reported earlier on Thursday to be intercepting traditionally privileged communications between lawyers and their clients.

Claiming not to have seen the specific reports, Hogan-Howe said he would be “amazed” if officials at MI5 and GCHQ were routinely eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations, adding: “That is very legally restricted unless the lawyer is involved with crime.”

“It’s very clear what the law says, which is obviously that there is a legal privilege that exists between a lawyer and their client,” he said. “And that is greatly respected.”

The Met police chief said that despite the elevation in the government’s official threat level to “severe” in August this year, there was at present no direct intelligence indicating a planned attack in the near future.

He declined to address when asked the likelihood of a terrorist plot being hatched using online communications to which law enforcement agencies no longer had access.