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Growing threat ... of privacy invasion

BRITAIN'S police and MI5 and MI6 spy agencies are understandably living in dread of a world-shaking terror attack on the summer Olympics.

Indeed they are so afraid of a new 9/11 that they plan an unprecedented invasion of our individual privacy.

All phone calls, texts, tweets and computer keystrokes are to be monitored, kept on file and used as and when seen fit.

This massive escalation in intelligence gathering has been condemned even by senior Tory MPs as nothing less than snooping.

Yet as innocent citizens are caught in this net, convicted extremists are openly recruiting jihadists under our noses.

Hate-preaching criminals behind bars are using the prison mail system to enlist converts to their murderous cause.

They have formed gangs whose rabble-rousing leaders turn non-militants into potential terrorists within days of starting their sentence.

Notorious Belmarsh Prison, where one in five inmates is Muslim, is a hotbed of radicalism.

Astonishingly, the leaders are kept under the same roof instead of being dispersed across the prison system.

They operate as a single-issue pressure group and are a sinister threat to national security.

Prison authorities have been bullied into submission over religious privileges, special food and signs pointing to Mecca.

Five times a day services are conducted in Arabic by imams and used to spread the jihadist message.

The man in charge of prisons is soft-shoe Justice Minister Ken Clarke.

While he cheerily presides over short sentences and early release, the radical website muslimprisoners.com flourished on his watch — until it was closed down on Friday night.

It carried letters from inmates revelling in cushy prison conditions described by some as "a holiday camp".

Would-be killer Roshonara Choudhry says her welcome by fellow fanatics has made her life sentence for knifing Labour MP Stephen Timms the "best" time of her life.

Prisons are not the only hotbeds of extremism allowed to flourish in Britain. MPs of all parties recently denounced timid and greedy university authorities for failing to weed out zealots.

Foreign students are a rich income stream for universities who, in return, refuse to "spy" on their activities.

MI5 has identified tens of thousands of British-born Muslims as potential security threats.

Dozens from the UK were rounded up in Afghanistan and held in Guantanamo Bay. Now we learn scores of radicalised Brits are being trained for a "holy war" in Somalia. So police and security services have their work cut out. They deserve all the help they can get. But Tory MPs and civil liberty campaigners are shocked by draconian new plans to put every citizen under surveillance.

Internet companies will be told to collect and store all online activities.

They will reveal precisely who we are in touch with, where and when.

Tory MP David Davis, who resigned as Shadow Home Secretary over civil rights, yesterday warned the measures were over the top.

"There are already adequate laws for surveillance," he said. "If it is needed, it should be subject to a warrant, not carried out indiscriminately."

Extreme circumstances require extreme measures.

But Britain is already one of the most spied-on societies in the free world.

Most of us accept CCTV, police drones, satellite trackers and automatic number plate recognition because we have nothing to hide.

But we have also learned that blanket surveillance - in the wrong hands - can be a dangerous step too far.

Labour was condemned for "recklessly" invading privacy by using anti-terror surveillance as a catch-all for spying.