Terror threat at its highest for 40 years, warns MI5 boss

Britain’s head of domestic intelligence has warned that the level of terrorist plotting against Britain is at its highest level in more than three decades. He said that it was necessary for “MI5 and others to be able to navigate the internet, to find terrorist communication”, but that this is becoming an increasingly hard task as “technology changes faster and faster”.

He also rejected the suggestion that security service tactics can lead to radicalisation in some targets and played down fears about extremists entering Europe among the thousands of refugees from Syria.

In the first broadcast interview by a serving MI5 boss, Mr Parker did not single out any of the companies by name. “The shape of the threat that we face today has changed because it’s driven from conflict zones… and the way that terrorists use social media, including from Syria”.

Mr Parker set out the challenges facing the security services as the Government prepares for a battle over legislation dubbed the “snooper’s charter”.

Parker went so far as to say that internet companies have an “ethical responsibility” over their data, and to share and report important data with the authorities.

Mr Parker told Mishal Husain on the Today programme, that the men and women who work in MI5 “are perhaps more ordinary than perhaps is described in fiction”.

Mr Parker said the current laws meant the security services “can no longer obtain under proper legal warrant the communication of people they believe to be terrorists”. We are not about browsing through the private lives of citizens of this country.

But moves to bolster surveillance have attracted widespread opposition, including from within Mr Cameron’s conservative party, fuelled in part by former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden who has suggested USA and British spies are conducting mass monitoring of communications. “We need to obtain other information about them”.

“I think it is possible to think of global agreements based on those high standards and principles”.

Facebook was identified as having hosted messages between the killers of fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013, raising questions over whether the site should have brought this to the authorities’ attention.

“In that case, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) concluded that had that happened it might have made a material difference to the outcome”, he said.