Last week, Britain’s Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, announced plans for a central database detailing every email sent, website visited, and phone call made within Britain. However, according to Smith, the database would not contain the content of emails, phone calls, etc., but only skeletal data such as the time an email was sent, and the addresses of the sender and recipient. This data is needed, according to Smith, in order to combat terrorism and other serious crime such as child pornography – though the main target would appear to be Islamist terrorists.
 
However, the proposal has been met with a largely negative response. Lord Carlile, the government’s reviewer of anti-terrorist laws, has called it, “[…] an awful idea if there are not very strict controls about it.” Chris Huhne of the Liberal Democrats Party called the proposal “Orwellian” and “[…] incompatible with a free country and a free people.” Daily Mail columnist Stephen Glover likewise suggested that it will effectively destroy the liberty and freedoms of the British people, and that, as such, “If Jacqui Smith gets her database, the terrorists will have won.”
 
Nevertheless, there is a clear need for monitoring and tackling Islamism on the web. As early as 2006, US defense chief Donald Rumsfeld said that the US was losing the propaganda battle against Al-Qaeda, because the latter had, “[…] skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age.” And although Islamism is spreading among the UK prison inmate population, websites, chatrooms, and email communications remain key to the Islamist agenda and methodology. Only in August did Hammaad Munshi, 16, become Britain’s youngest convicted terrorist. Notably, Munshi had been part of a cell of “cyber groomers,” distributing Islamist material and radicalizing Muslims via the web.
 
In his Virtual Caliphate: Islamic Extremists and Their Websites [pdf] (published by The Centre for Social Cohesion), James Brandon asserts that considerable damage has been done to Islamist networks in Britain over the last few years: “Laws prohibiting the ‘glorification of terrorism’ have led to radical speakers ‘toning down’ their public talks” (p. 74), for example. Radical mosques find it more difficult to exist than they had previously, and the flow of funds from abroad has been disrupted, he says. However, Brandon states that Islamists have responded, moving their operations onto the web.
 
Websites run by British Islamist groups not only relay Al-Qaeda propaganda, but provide virtual libraries of the writings and recorded speeches of well-known radical preachers – often either convicted or living abroad in order to escape arrest in Britain – as well as sermons by younger, lesser-known preachers, inciting hatred and urging jihad against the West, democracy, Jews, Christians, homosexuals, etc. And, according to Brandon, users of one Islamist website he studied, are in direct contact, “by telephone, email and paltalk, an online chat programme […]” (p. xiii) with Abdullah Faisal, a Jamaican-born convert to Islam and one of the UK’s most influential Islamist preachers, and Omar Bakri, a former leader of the Islamist group, al-Muhajiroun who fled Britain after the 7/7 bombings. With the same technology disciples are also able to distribute messages from these preachers.
 
None of this, though, indicates the necessity for a database of information detailing the web and phone activity of everyone in Britain. Indeed, such indiscriminate trawling of data seems bound, eventually, to bog down counter-terrorism efforts, and, moreover, to lead to serious abuses of people not suspected of terrorist activity. As Huhne said in response to Smith’s announcement:
 
Ministers claim the database will only be used in terrorist cases, but there is now a long list of cases, from the arrest of Walter Wolfgang for heckling at a Labour conference to the freezing of Icelandic assets, where anti-terrorism law has been used for purposes for which it was not intended.
 
Our experience of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act suggests these powers will soon be used to spy on people's children, pets and bins.
 
Smith herself did nothing to preempt such concern, for although she asked for a “well-informed debate characterised by openness,” her announcement of the proposal was couched in fuzzy pseudo-legalisms apparently designed to obscure its nature:

“What we will be proposing will be options which follow the key principles which govern all our work in this area – the principles of proportionality and necessity.”

More problematically for the government, its surveillance measures generally, though prolific, appear to be continually rendered worthless by government ideology. Thus, while Britain now has more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world, serious crime has only increased under Labour, and prosecutions and sentences of suitable length seem almost impossible to secure. Fear of being accused of “racism” or “Islamophobia,” or of enflaming community tensions, has meant that the authorities are also reluctant to prosecute Islamist preachers, and Islamists more generally. As Brandon notes, “laws against glorifying or promoting terrorism on the internet are not being adequately enforced” (p. 77). In February, five men convicted of terrorist offenses after downloading and sharing terrorist material, were freed on appeal.
 
The British authorities need to be able to tackle terrorism and other serious crime, and adapting to new technologies is obviously necessary in this pursuit. However, so far, the government has not made the case for the indiscriminate mining of data, especially in light of the authorities’ almost habitual abuse of anti-terror laws. Existing laws need, then, to be enforced as appropriate, and new measures must be targeted if they are not to become counterproductive in the fight on terror.