LONDON – Once upon a time, when a military officer in the field needed to securely communicate orders and intelligence to his compatriots at a distance, he would dispatch a runner with the message. These messages often would be encoded to stymie the enemy, should the runner fall into their hands. Such communications signals were the original intelligence “chatter” and the precursor to today’s complex digital communications systems.

At every phase of human history, as communications technologies and techniques have evolved and become more sophisticated, so too have the communications tactics and protocols used by military and militants. In many cases, in fact, it’s the militaries of the world that develop those technologies, or that get first crack at using them.

What humans generally haven’t done along the way, as communications technology has developed, is to hold those technologies, or the companies that offer them, responsible for how individuals or groups of people choose to use the technologies.

In other words, when a mafia Don uses the telephone to order a hit on some unsuspecting goombah, we don’t subsequently tell AT&T it’s their social responsibility to do something about all these mafia Dons using their technology. We can—and do—ask AT&T to provide surveillance access to law enforcement, once we have a valid legal basis to make such a request, but to expect AT&T to do more to proactively prevent illegal use of any given telephone with access to their network is absurd and impractical.

The same is true of any other communication platform terrorists or criminals use to transmit messages and share information.

Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, an adult-themed chatroom or two public phone booths on opposite sides of the planet, there’s only so much the companies operating the platform can do to police how it is used. There’s even less they can do to proactively prevent misuse of their technology, since a big part of the consumer appeal of their products is ease of access and ease of use.

This is not how certain members of the UK’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) see things, though.

In their view, social media companies like Facebook, Twitter—and seemingly any other platform that offers some degree of encrypted communication—need to do much more to help the UK government spy on end-users.

In a recent op-ed, GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan argued privacy has never been “an absolute right” and asserted the dangers presented by groups like ISIS using social media encourage a far cozier and more intimately cooperative relationship between private-sector companies and government agencies like the GCHQ.

“Terrorists have always found ways of hiding their operations,” Hannigan observed. “But today, mobile technology and smartphones have increased the options available exponentially. Techniques for encrypting messages or making them anonymous, which were once the preserve of the most sophisticated criminals or nation states, now come as standard. These are supplemented by freely available programs and apps adding extra layers of security, many of them proudly advertising that they are ‘Snowden approved.’ There is no doubt that young foreign fighters have learnt and benefited from the leaks of the past two years.”

What Hannigan wrote is true—arguably, at least—but it’s also arguably beside the point.

ISIS and others like them don’t need to use advanced technology to frustrate the investigative intent of law enforcement. They can just hop on the phone and use the same manner of veiled, coded references to operational details that they have used for years.

In the aftermath of 9/11, investigators sifting through the ocean of intercepted signals intelligence collected prior to the attacks found a number of suspicious statements (both about 9/11 and other operations) which had piqued their curiosity at the time of their original recording, but intelligence officers couldn’t decipher until after the fact. “Engineers” were bombers, for example, “weddings” were attacks and the “guests” who were to attend the “weddings” were the agents carrying out the attacks themselves.

As you might anticipate, in the months and years that followed, as information was released about where and how the governments of the world were conducting surveillance on terrorist and militant groups, those groups adapted their tactics to stay a step ahead of the game. This isn’t a surprise. The surprise would be if such groups didn’t evolve and adjust.

Labor MP Jim Sheridan recently complained when executives from companies like Google and Facebook appeared before his committee, it seemed to him they “don’t take their social responsibilities all that seriously.”

I tend to agree, frankly, but it simply doesn’t follow that the answer is for companies like these to give the government carte blanche to sift through their data, actively monitor their users or give the government a heads up every time someone posts a message in support of a militant group of which the UK government does not approve.

They have often been misquoted and/or tortured in paraphrase, but the actual words of Ben Franklin hit the nail squarely on the head:

[QUOTE]Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.[/QUOTE]

If we require social media companies to become de facto partners in the government’s law enforcement and intelligence work, the benefit would be a marginal increase in “temporary Safety” as Franklin put it. In exchange, we would be allowing the government to sniff around in places where there may not be even a whiff of impropriety, sacrificing a measure of our essential Liberty in the process.

It’s not hard to understand the urgency felt by guys like Robert Hannigan. After all, this is a person whose job requires him to spend considerable time fretting about worst-case scenarios when it comes to terrorism and other crimes that communications technologies can and do facilitate.

What is hard to understand is the apparent belief that it’s possible to provide substantially better security and safety to British citizens by closely monitoring their social media use, the apps they download to their smartphones, the contents of the encrypted emails they send and the digital footprints they leave when surfing porn sites.

Here’s hoping tech firms stand their ground and continue to cooperate with the government on the basis of reasonable legal requests, rather than as a routine matter of their daily operations.