Dame Stella Rimington
speaker
45 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2013
last heard Jun 2013
Dame Stella Rimington’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
and intelligence services can strangle themselves if they have too much information because they can't sort out what they need to know and what they don't need to know etc.
So in all this search for information you've got to be pretty focused and targeted.
Well, if the implication of that criticism is that the security service should know everything that everybody who is known to them is doing every hour of every day, then it clearly isn't reasonable.
I mean, I don't know how many suspects there are, but let's say, and one has read this in the newspaper, that there are about 2,000.
And if you want to follow an individual around 24 hours a day, you would probably need a team of, let's say, six people.
And that's probably under-egging it with cars so that they would be ready either to follow this person away if he went out in a car or to leap out the car and follow him if he was on foot.
but that team of people would work for let's say six hours a day so you need to do it 24 hours a day you need three shifts of that for one person and then you might need other people static surveillance people sitting in a house for example to alert these people when the person was coming out because you can't just sit outside the house you've obviously got to sit somewhere else
Then you've got to have a control centre who is obviously receiving the information coming in from these people and directing them.
Then all that information has to go to a desk officer who is in charge of the case.
So you're building up a large group of people and we're only talking about one of these manifold suspects we hear about.
And doing that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while you're the mathematician, you do the sums.
It's an awful lot of people.
The people who will be on the list, if there is a list, will be people who have for one reason or another come to the attention of the security services, either because they've done something else or some source of information has reported these people.
or they've been associating with other people who are already known to be bad guys.
But there are degrees of potential involvement, and the whole art of the intelligence operation is to try and identify the people who are most likely to do something and focus their attention on those people.
And, of course, that means that you might sometimes get it wrong.
And everybody who knows anything about intelligence says there's no such thing as 100% certainty with intelligence.
Now it seems to me, looking at this entirely from the outside, that what they're dealing with is largely a group of individuals with certain views, not necessarily directed from any headquarters, and this is a much, much more difficult target, I think, than the targets of the old days.
Well, I think the communications data bill that was designed to allow the intelligence services to know more about emails and our use of modern communications, as I see it, that was merely a way of bringing up to date the powers which the intelligence services already have to intercept our old-fashioned communications.
I mean, they can now intercept our telephone communications if they can get a warrant from the Home Secretary to do it.
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