National security

UK Muslims and extremism - II: MI5 pays “good” Muslims to snoop on “bad” Muslims

Even as the row over a new counter-terror surveillance law, obliging teachers to spy on their Muslim students, is still raging, another has erupted. This one around revelations that MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, is paying Muslim informants - having links with the Islamist “underworld” — to snoop on their co-religionists.

Critics say the problem is not that someone is being paid to watch someone else. That's standard intelligence procedure. What’s worrying is something more fundamental. It is the sheer scale of surveillance that one community is being subjected to. Extending it from schools and colleges to mosques, community centres and residential neighbourhoods, that's profoundly wrong.