In almost every terrorist attack since 9/11, those responsible were already on the radar of the intelligence agencies

The German parliament passed without much fuss legislation in October that vastly expanded the surveillance powers of the country’s intelligence agencies.



That it went through the Bundestag so easily was surprising given the still raw history of surveillance in Germany; first by the Nazis and then the near-blanket coverage of East Germany by its then intelligence agency, the Stasi. Nowhere else in western Europe is the issue of protection of privacy felt as strongly as in Germany.

But the intelligence agencies managed to override privacy concerns, citing the string of terrorist attacks in France, Belgium and Germany itself. The cabinet, in response to the Berlin attack, agreed on Wednesday to a bill that would extend the use of CCTV to shopping centres, sports arenas, car parks and other public areas.

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Does the Berlin attack make the case for increased surveillance? The attack at one level fails to make the case for mass surveillance. Privacy campaigners are not opposed to intelligence agencies and the police targeting suspects: that is what they are supposed to do and what they have always done. What privacy campaigners oppose is blanket surveillance of everyone, and argue that the Berlin attack did not require it: the suspect, Anis Amri, was already known to the security services through traditional forms of intelligence.

In almost every terrorist act since the 9/11 attacks, those responsible were already on the radar of the intelligence agencies: the Boston bombers, the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby in London, the attackers in Paris and Brussels. And now, Amri, the Tunisian being hunted by intelligence agencies across Europe as the prime suspect for the Berlin attack.

Amri had been on a watchlist since January and under covert surveillance for several months. The intelligence agencies also knew he possessed various fake IDs and had links with Islamic State. But for a still undisclosed reason the intelligence agencies lost track of him.

Privacy campaigners would argue that instead of wasting resources gathering and sifting through the volume of data being accumulated through mass surveillance, the resources would be better allocated in providing more personnel for targeted surveillance.

One of the biggest problems facing all intelligence agencies is that mounting surveillance on an individual such as Amri, including tapping his phone, requires an enormous number of staff. Intelligence agencies are coy about exact figures, but on average surveillance of just one person might require 25 to 40 people. The agencies have to make hard decisions about who they will watch full time and they make mistakes – as the British intelligence agencies did in the Rigby case.

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Richard Barrett, who was head of counter-terrorism at the UK’s foreign intelligence agency MI6, told BBC Radio 4 that it was understandable how some people slipped through the net. He said there were 7,000 live cases in Germany – people suspected of being in touch with extremist groups and worthy of investigation – of whom 550 were “really extreme potential terrorists”. He said: “As you can imagine, that is an almost impossible number to control.”

It is nearly impossible for the agencies to get it right time after time. This is because they are having to deal not just with suspects such as Amri but the “lone wolf” – an individual who has not attracted attention but who mounts a spontaneous attack after watching propaganda from groups such as Isis.

Al-Qaida plotters focus on spectacular terrorist attacks such as bringing down planes. Isis has opted so far for low-tech attacks and its recent propaganda has encouraged lone wolves, even suggesting using trucks.

Raffaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at London’s Royal United Services Institute, said of the Berlin attack: “Clearly, there has been an intelligence failure.”

He said Germany was pretty good at human intelligence – gathering information on the ground – but not as good as the National Security Agency in the US or the UK’s GCHQ at intercepting bulk communications. German intelligence relies on both of those countries sharing information with it.

When the row over the NSA tapping of Merkel’s phone broke in 2013, there were howls of protest from German politicians. The German intelligence agencies, as beneficiaries of some NSA data, did not protest too strongly but instead sought to use the row to leverage the NSA into providing it with even more data.

Those who support mass surveillance, in particular the retention of digital data, would argue that the the Berlin attack justifies this approach. The New York Times reported US officials as saying that Amri had researched how to make bombs online and had contacted Isis at least once. The surveillance agencies would cite this as demonstrating the value of being able to access vast amounts of data that can be thoroughly searched.

Cooperation in an international manhunt is relatively straightforward but European countries sharing intelligence is not in general. While the US and UK – and to a lesser extent Germany and France – have high levels of intelligence-sharing, Europe-wide cooperation is patchy. Countries such as the UK are reluctant to share intelligence with smaller European countries, fearful that sources might be compromised.

While the UK would almost certainly pass on information if it thought an attack was imminent, less urgent information will often not be shared with countries with smaller intelligence agencies. After every European attack, there are calls for an organisation to be created that is more effective than Interpol and the other European agencies: a European CIA or FBI. But this has not been followed through and, given the differing capabilities of agencies across Europe, creation of such an agency appears unlikely.