Former Head of British Intelligence Says Another Terror Attack Is Likely - East Idaho News
World

Former Head of British Intelligence Says Another Terror Attack Is Likely

  Published at

Getty 012015 JohnSawers?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1421788421199Toby Melville – WPA Pool/Getty Images(LONDON) — John Sawers, the former chief of Britain’s intelligence service MI6, said on Tuesday at a speaking engagement that another terrorist attack against the U.K. is likely.

While police and the Government Communications Headquarters are doing a “fantastic job” thwarting numerous potential terror plots, Sawers said that not all threats will be stopped. “If I was to sit here and say, will the goalkeepers of the security service and the police keep every single attempt to get the ball into the net? No,” Sawers said. “Some of these threats will get through and there will be another terrorist attack in this country.”

“There needs to be some new compact,” the former spy chief said regarding surveillance, “if we are not going to see events like Paris last week and which we have seen in Yemen and Nigeria and so on become more and more features of our lives.” His speech included a call for data sharing between intelligence agencies and technology companies, according to BBC News.

Sawers placed some of the blame for the lack of trust between those companies and the government on U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. BBC News quotes the former MI6 head as saying that Snowden “threw a massive rock in the pool and the ripples haven’t stopped yet.”


Copyright © 2015, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.

SUBMIT A CORRECTION