Citizen-Led Intelligence Gathering under UK's Prevent Duty

Abstract

Since 9/11, normalisation of surveillance activities in the name of national security has become a norm and civilians are constantly subjected to some form of monitoring. This chapter discusses the British government's Prevent Strategy, to highlight Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) as a new arena of community-led intelligence that encroaches on every facet of domestic life by making surveillance a statutory duty. Prevent places a legal obligation on civilians employed in specified authorities to keep people from being drawn into terrorism. By diffusing counter-terrorism policing within everyday life, this policy is altering the traditional understanding of intelligence practices, the sites where it is conducted, and the actors carrying these out. By folding citizens into the security apparatus, Prevent Strategy is turning ordinary citizens into street-level intelligence agents and everyday life into a perpetual sphere of intelligence gathering. To firmly embed intelligence gathering within the society, Prevent has deployed a dual approach of turning the policy into a legal obligation while routing it through welfare activity and safeguarding work. As such, the policy combines the coercion of statutory duty with an appeal to civilians’ sense of duty of care. This approach has allowed the policy to become more prevalent yet stay imperceptible.