Woolwich attack: why David Cameron is right to reject knee-jerk responsesSecurity hawks have wasted no time in demanding new counter-terror measures but the PM is wise to resist them←

Alan Travis, home affairs editor ← guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 May 2013 14.43 BST

David Cameron's calm rejection on the steps of Downing Street of any knee-jerk responses was a welcome riposte to the security hawks who have already taken to the airways to demand a battery of new counter-terror measures.

A former home secretary, a former government reviewer of terrorism laws and two ex-security ministers have wasted no time in using Woolwich to attack the coalition's decision earlier this month to shelve the "snooper's charter" bill.

Lord West, the former admiral of the fleet and former Labour security minister, is the latest to warn that without the communications data bill it will be more difficult in future for police and intelligence investigators to get hold of terror suspects' phone records to trace their contacts.

"That information is extremely important for our security services to be able to pin down people, find out who they are linked with, who radicalised them," he said.

Others have focused on the need to step up the ideological campaign, especially in countering jihadist websites and to restore some of the counter-terror powers that have been scaled back on civil liberty grounds since the coalition came to power.

As Lord Carlile, who happens to be a Liberal Democrat peer but is close to the security establishment, put it: "I hope that this will give the government pause for thought about their abandonment, for example, of the communications data bill and possibly pause for thought about converting control orders into what [are] now called Tpims [terrorism prevention and investigation measures]."

This is not an academic question. Their public frustration reflects the view inside the security services and the Whitehall counter-terrorism machine.

The home secretary, Theresa May, was not impressed when Nick Clegg earlier this month blocked any further immediate progress on the communications data bill, which would allow the tracking of everyone's email, internet and mobile text use.

Clegg told her it was unworkable and disproportionate but May has since insisted it is still essential: "This is not about indiscriminately accessing internet data of innocent members of the public, it is about ensuring that police and other law enforcement agencies have the powers they need to investigate the activities of criminals that take place online as well as offline," remains the Home Office's public position.

The attorney-general, Dominic Grieve, confirmed to a conference last Saturday organised by the charity Liberty that talks were still going on within the coalition over the fate of the bill. It is now to be expected that May, with the backing of several other powerful supporters in cabinet, will demand that it be put back into this year's legislative programme.

Clegg has already agreed that work should go ahead on the technical problem of there being many more mobile phones than the unique internet protocol addresses needed to match them to particular individuals. Cameron will now come under severe pressure to revisit the entire question.

May at the Home Office and Eric Pickles, in charge at the Department for Communities and Local Government, are also likely to press for much greater investment to go into the Prevent counter-terrorism programme, especially its relatively successful "channel project" under which more than 200 teenagers believed to be at risk have been turned away from radicalisation.

It is unlikely that Cameron would have made his "no knee-jerk responses" pledge without first talking to Clegg as well as May but the Whitehall security establishment now sees a clear political opportunity to expand their powers that did not exist a few days ago.

However, it is worth reflecting however that the Cobra emergency committee meetings took no decision to raise the current threat level. Despite the Woolwich attack it remains at "substantial", that an attack is a strong possibility, where it has stood, with the single exception of last summer's Olympics, since July 2011. That is the third out of a possible five levels. It is now nearly six years since the threat level in Britain has been at "critical".

The current official reviewer of counter-terrorism laws, David Anderson QC, has warned in the past that terrorism law "gives excessive weight to the idea that terrorism is different, losing sight of the principle that terrorism is above all crime, and that special laws to deal with it need to be justified by the peculiar nature of the crime".

His criticism was that "elements of the law have been conceived and applied with excessive enthusiasm". It is worth reflecting that, so far, Woolwich has proved to be a very nasty but one-off terrorist murder and no more. Cameron is right to say he is not in favour of knee-jerk responses.