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.
"It's too extensive and intrusive and unacceptable in a civilised society in peacetime," said a rights campaigner.
Muslims say they feel under siege.
"It's almost Orwellian. We are not safe anywhere from prying eyes of the government Big Brother," Mohammed Sohail, owner of a London corner shop said.
But before we go further, here's a flavour of MI5's strategy as reported by The Observer in a front page splash.
The report, which has not been denied or challenged either by MI5 directly or any other official sources, claimed that "individuals across the UK, including in Manchester and London”, were being employed on temporary assignments to acquire intelligence on specific targets. It quoted a source who did not want to be named for obvious reasons that he "knew of an informant recently paid £2,000 by the British security services to spy on activities relating to a mosque over a six-week period."
"The initiative is being co-ordinated under the government's official post-9/11 counter-terrorism strategy, specifically the strand known as Pursue, which has an official remit to 'stop terrorist attacks in this country and against our interest overseas' by 'detecting and investigating threats at the earliest possible stage',” the paper said.
A source "with knowledge of the payments” was reported as saying: "It's been driven by the [intelligence] agencies, it's a network of human resources across the country engaged to effectively spy on specific targets. It's decent money.”
The number of informants receiving government funding or how much of the agency's national security budget is allocated to such transactions is not known.
Apart from the ethical issues around snooping on a community on such a massive scale, there is criticism of the value of intelligence "corrupted” by the money paid for it. Muslim leaders, while sharing concerns about protecting national security, object to the means being deployed to target the community. They have called for a more open and transparent system with proper oversight to ensure that information used to prosecute suspects is authentic and not based on rumour and gossip bought with cash.
There is concern that paid informants are likely to distort, exaggerate or invent stuff to satisfy their paymasters. And this could result in innocent people being harassed.
"We want our national security protected but, as with everything, there needs to be due scrutiny and we need to ensure things are done properly. If there's money on the table, where's the scrutiny or the oversight to ensure whether someone has not just come up with some fabricated information? Money can corrupt,” said Salman Farsi, spokesman for the East London Mosque, Britain's largest masjid.
The Tory government has been accused of repeating the "mistake” of its Labour predecessors who threw "tens of millions of pounds”, according to one close observer, on a raft of counter-terror initiatives after the 2005 London bombings but without achieving its goals. One of the most hyped such initiative, 'Prevent', on which money has been lavishly spent, has been a spectacular failure.
"When they started dishing out money, everyone was willing for a bit of money to dish the dirt, make up stuff. There's good work to be done, but quite frankly you don't need to send in informants to mosques to find out what's going on,” said Farsi.
There are calls for a fresh approach with genuine community engagement at the heart of any strategy. Mohammed Shafiq, an anti-extremism campaigner, says Prime Minister David Cameron has "not engaged them about his counter-terrorism strategy."
"If Muslims are central to defeating the poisonous narrative then why not engage the community?" he wrote on The Guardian blog, commenting on a speech by Cameron suggesting that Muslims were not doing enough to check extremism.
Meanwhile, another criticism of the MI5 operation is that it is based on the notion of "good" extremists and "bad” extremists – much like Pakistan's self-serving distinction between "good" and "bad” Taliban ("our bastard is better than yours”). Britain's security establishment is seen to be so desperate that it is willing to hand cash to a group of mostly dubious characters without even being sure of the reliability of the "intelligence” they may provide.
The irony is that British intelligence agencies did something similar in the 1990s (instead of offering money they offered a lot of shady fellows protection from prosecution in exchange for information on other shady guys) but it backfired spectacularly as many of them ended up abusing the privilege.
How it will turn out this time is anybody's guess, but it is yet another example of the British state's blundering response to a serious and complex problem. Over the past decade, we have seen failed policies being recycled again and again under a new label – dressed up as a freshly-minted initiative - and look where it has got us. Extremism has grown instead of showing any sign of a decline.
Failure is not a big deal, the problem is refusal to acknowledge it and learn lessons from it. In the words of the great American basketball player John Wooden, "Failure isn't fatal but failure to change might be."
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