Sir Max Hastings speaks to Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club

Sir Max Hastings speaks to Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club

I was delighted to arrange distinguished journalist and author, Sir Max Hastings, to speak at the Foreign Correspondence Club in Hong Kong last week.

Max spoke on What the World War Two Code-Breakers of Bletchley Park Taught Us About How To Fight The Wars of the 21st century.

During the Q and A the 70-year-old author and journalist gave a robust defense of electronic intelligence-gathering in what he called a new world that would never know absolute security.

"Our tolerance of electronic surveillance, subject to legal and parliamentary oversight, seems a small price to pay for some measure of security against threats that nobody - today of all days - can doubt are real," Hastings said at the Foreign Correspondents' Club a day after dozens died in attacks by Islamic State terrorists in Brussels.

He finds it "almost incredible" that civil libertarians object so strongly to official eavesdropping.

In Britain's case, he added, electronic interception was the only major way to detect terrorists as it is "almost impossibly difficult for agents to penetrate Muslim communities," who provide "dismayingly little help."

Rather than electronic snooping, Hastings added, he was more worried about drones, saying that "it's a very, very dangerous business" to delegate to government the powers "to act unilaterally without any judicial process at all to just kill whoever they feel like."

 



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