For a man who would prefer to remain in the shadows, he's got an incendiary turn of phrase.
Social media, he said, is the "command and control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals".
Technology companies, said Robert Hannigan, are "in denial about its misuse".
And the new head of GCHQ, has called for "a more sustainable relationship between the (intelligence) agencies and the technology companies.
"Increasingly their services not only host the material of violent or child exploitation…," ah pity - that's where the argument for greater government access to the data on users of social media begins to collapse.
In invoking visceral fears of child molesters, the head of the UK's surveillance agency is preying on the nation's deep dark fears to seek national permission to snoop into every corner of our lives.
I'm reminded at this point of a private conversation I had with a Cabinet minister who was pushing the Communications Data Bill - which has since been shelved.
"If you've got nothing to hide you have nothing to fear," the minister said.
Really?
"Paedophile rings and terrorists are getting ahead of us. We need to get access to their data to prevent their attacks," the minister added.
One can safely assume that the new GCHQ boss, Mr Hannigan, and the minister are entirely decent people with a dependable grasp of the notion that free speech is the blood of democracy.
But whatever the horrors that terrorists have in store for us, the spies have not made the strategic case for the abandoned "Snoopers' Charter" or for even wider powers to suborn the private sector into conducting surveillance of its own clients.
"Trust me" isn't a good enough position to take when the spy agencies have been exposed for the bugging of allies and the wholesale mining of private communications.
In the UK they don't even face judicial oversight when dipping into phone and internet data. Warrants are issued by ministers, not magistrates.
Mr Hannigan argues that Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has "embraced the web as a noisy channel in which to promote itself" and that GCHQ, MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service cannot "tackle these challenges at scale without greater support from the private sector".
That is obviously a Bad Thing.
But so is a licence to almost unlimited plunder of private data because it won't just be the "trustworthy" Western powers that demand it.
If gobble, faceache, twaddle, whatsit, and instabore were to agree to share their data with Western spooks, they would have to open their servers to the scrutiny of China, to Russia, or North Korea too.
The spy chief is angry that Islamic State has harnessed the borderless freedom of the internet to its own advantage. So should anyone be who is repulsed by the videos of mass murder and beheading it has been sending out.
But that isn't an argument for censorship or the unfettered right for spy agencies to mine our metadata and peek into our online lives.
They cannot and should not be trusted to do that.
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