Report 'sympathetic' towards security services

A lot of people are going to look at the Intelligence and Security Committee report and conclude that it was a fairly generous assessment of the role of the security services.

After all here were two murderers, two terrorists, who had firmly been on the radar. The subject of seven separate investigations - one of them had been under surveillance.

And there was evidence, it's just that it wasn't flagged up or found by the security services. That online exchange between Michael Adebowale and a foreign Jihadist over the internet.

But that whole point really shifts the onus of this argument. Increasingly we will hear from the Government about the role that the internet companies should be playing.

I think the authors of this report were fairly sympathetic about the situation at the security services. They marked the fact that they are overstretched and have an increasing workload and they hinted that they found some reluctance when dealing with American internet giants.

Of course though, it is not up to the likes of Facebook or Google or YouTube to protect our national security, that is for the security services. However the Government is now going to look at further legislation to compel internet companies to hand over more data that they have.