The hostile reaction of the British and US governments to the Snowden disclosures of mass surveillance only served to heighten public suspicion of the work of the intelligence agencies, according to an international conference of senior intelligence and security figures.

The recently published official account of a Ditchley Foundation conference last month says one of the event’s main conclusions was that greater transparency about the activities and capabilities of the security services would be essential if their credibility was to be preserved and enhanced around the world.

The account of the conference chaired by Sir John Scarlett, the former head of MI6, was published on Friday and makes clear the foundation recognised the widespread public unease following the revelations and that the conditions of data collection about individuals and who has access to it are legitimate areas of concern.

Sir John Holmes, the foundation’s director, said while Snowden’s disclosures had not revealed the intelligence agencies to be out of control, they “had shocked the publics in many countries because they had been unaware of the nature of much intelligence work, as well as uninformed about the authorisation and oversight arrangements already in place”.

The conference was attended by leading figures in the British and international intelligence and security community. The UK contingent included Robert Hannigan, director of GCHQ, Lewis Neal, Foreign Office intelligence policy director, and Peter Clarke, ex-head of the Metropolitan police counter-terrorism command, as well as a BBC journalist, Gordon Corera.

The participants agreed that “one thing governments and parliaments could do to increase trust and improve awareness was to hold more debates about these issues, rather than trying to avoid them”.

They wrote: “The reaction of the governments most concerned after the Snowden revelations had often appeared as ducking and weaving, trying to reveal as little as possible, or attempting to change the subject, rather than getting ahead of the argument. This had only made things worse and increased public suspicion.”



Another participant, the security journalist Duncan Campbell, has reported that to many participants’ surprise, there was general agreement across broad divides of opinion that Snowden had changed the landscape.



The journalist wrote that there was agreement that more transparency, or at least “translucency”, and providing more information about intelligence activities affecting privacy, was both overdue and necessary. “No one tried to debate whether Snowden was a villain, traitor or hero,” Campbell said.

The indication of a new post-Snowden consensus within the international intelligence and security community of the significance and impact of his disclosures emerges a day after the Sunday Times cited Home Office sources warning that British agents have had to be withdrawn from live operations as a consequence of the Snowden leaks.

Traditionally, debates on intelligence issues organised by the Ditchley Foundation, which specialises in high-level transatlantic international policy debates, had been kept confidential. But Holmes said it was time for change to reflect “these more transparent times”.

International participants included the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator, a former acting director of the CIA, Canada’s national security adviser and former senior figures in the German, French and Australian intelligence agencies.

The participants debated extensively the issue of the bulk collection of personal data, and while they agreed it did not in itself amount to “mass surveillance”, it could be used for that purpose without proper regulation and oversight.

Participants also conceded that as the flood of personal data increases, concerns about individual privacy will not go away any time soon, and that access for the security services to the data held by private companies, such as Twitter and Google, will have to be through the frontdoor and not by secret, backdoor programmes such as the Prism and Tempora schemes revealed by Snowden.

According to Holmes’s account, there “was optimism that relations between private companies and agencies could be regularised and improved post-Snowden” as long as access to individuals’ information was via “properly authorised, legally sound and specific warrants”. “Nothing else would be acceptable to their customers,” the director concluded.



