LONDON — After four home-grown suicide bombers killed 52 London commuters on July 7, 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed that Britain would stop at nothing to defeat terrorism. “Let no one be in any doubt,” he said. “The rules of the game are changing.”
Since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States four years earlier, Britain had made its anti-terrorism powers among the toughest in the Western world. Now they became tougher still.
“What 7/7 did was it made people realize that the threat was internal as well as external,” said David Anderson, Britain’s official reviewer of terrorism legislation.
After 2005, police were given power to hold terrorism suspects for four weeks without charge, or to place them under a 16-hour-a-day curfew. It became a crime not just to commit or plan for terrorism but to glorify terrorist acts. The government moved to deport extremist preachers who had made their home in Britain. The ability of intelligence agencies to scoop up Internet users’ electronic data expanded vastly, and British spies began collecting information on their own citizens on a hitherto unseen scale.
