John Green takes issue with former GCHQ head David Omand’s statement that ‘web giants are a bigger privacy threat than the state’

The former head of GCHQ, David Omand, is being particularly tendentious when he maintains that “web giants are a bigger privacy threat than the state” (Report, 9 October). He says state security agencies are “extraordinarily strictly regulated” and that “warrants have to be signed by a senior judge”. So how come GCHQ was intimately involved in several illegal spying activities?

He also singularly fails to point out that the big difference between a state spying on its citizens and internet companies is that the former have the means of repression in their hands whereas the big internet companies do not. The material they collect only becomes a threat when it is passed on to the state or political organisations.

In 2004 the Guardian reported on the revelations of former GCHQ translator Katharine Gun, who talked of a dirty tricks campaign by GCHQ to bug the offices and homes in New York of UN diplomats from the six “swing states”, countries whose support would be vital if Washington and London were to win a security council resolution authorising the invasion of Iraq.

And again, in February 2015, the secretive investigatory powers tribunal declared that GCHQ was found to be “unlawfully spying on British citizens” and that this “breached their human rights”.

Those are only two blatant examples of GCHQ’s misuse of collected data. There is undoubtedly much more we don’t know. How does all this square with Omand’s bland pronouncements?

John Green

London

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition