UK Intelligence Comunity Trying to Adapt to Rapidly Changing Threats

Sam Jones

September 22, 2015

UK spy agencies face ever-shifting threats

The day after a lone Islamist gunman murdered 30 Britons in the Tunisian beach resort of Sousse, Alex Younger, the new chief of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, wrote to his staff setting out the challenges they faced.

Ten years of relative success in keeping Britain free of terrorist attack was a remarkable record, he said, but the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, had brought new threats. Sousse — the worst terrorist attack against UK citizens since the London bombings of 2005 — was a terrible reminder of that.

SIS, better known as MI6, is not alone in its concerns: officials in Whitehall say all three of Britain’s intelligence agencies face significant hurdles in dealing with a growing and evolving terrorism threat and advances in technology. Britain’s spies are keeping up with terrorists, they say — but only just.

As the government considers its options for its five-year strategic defence and security review this autumn, the work of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ will be at the forefront. In a speech in July, David Cameron, prime minister, spelt out his view of the UK’s security challenge. Intelligence, he said, was at its centre.

The agencies are not necessarily clamouring for more money. Their current settlement — £2.1bn annually, paid through the single intelligence account — is likely to grow steadily. Their more pressing needs are on manpower, in particular specialised talents, and for enhanced legal powers to support their work.

Last Thursday Andrew Parker, director-general of MI5, gave his first ever public interview to try to hammer home the problems he and his peers are facing. The number of threats MI5 had dealt with in the past 12 months, Mr Parker said, was the highest in his career, and interrupting plots was becoming more difficult.

Two interlinked trends are at the centre of the challenge. The first is the threat posed by Isis, and how it differs as a terrorist organisation to any that have gone before it.

The second is the technological dilemma raised by the revelations of Edward Snowden, the US security contractor who leaked a vast trove of classified documents in 2013. The leak, which exposed US and UK bulk data collection from the internet, has pushed tech companies keen to protect their reputations with consumers to concentrate far more on encryption.

Apple’s iPhone 6, for example, and Google’s latest Android platforms come with end-to-end encryption as standard. Even if the companies wanted to give their customers’ data to intelligence agencies, they would be unable to.

“Counter-terrorism now is a completely different sort of profession for the agencies to what it was only a couple of years ago,” says Michael Clarke, director-general of the Royal United Services Institute, the think-tank. “The security services know that their lives are becoming much more difficult. The sheer scale of Isis’s activities and the spread of encryption are having a huge impact.

“They [the security services] almost talk about the last decade and a half as a sort of golden age — one that is coming to a close.”

For MI5, the rise of Isis means having to become more nimble — to adapt its process of prioritising investigations to take into account a far broader network of radicals than ever. It now monitors 3,000 “subjects of interest” in the UK. And it has its work cut out trying to help stop the passage of some of them to Syria.

The ability of Isis to contact, inspire and radicalise individuals at a distance via social media means the old apparatus, set up to disrupt complex plots involving regular overseas communication and hidden cells, is no longer adequate. Indeed, according to one security official, many of those who are trying to travel to Syria — and potentially represent a threat in the UK — are people who have never appeared on MI5’s radar before.

For MI6, meanwhile, there is a greater than ever requirement to produce tactical, actionable foreign intelligence as opposed to the analysis of longer-term threats and challenges. That shift began after the September 11 attacks but it will need to intensify.

The emergence of Isis epitomises the shift in a technological arms race that does not necessarily favour the west any more

- Nigel Inkster, director of transnational threats at the International Institute of Strategic Studies

Tunisia, say security officials, highlighted the need for MI6 to have much closer political and intelligence relationships with countries in regions where Islamist extremists have a strong presence, in order to give spymasters in London a better awareness of the terrorism threat there. That may mean putting more resources into such countries.

For GCHQ, the government’s electronic eavesdropping agency and the biggest of the UK’s spy organisations, the challenge is perhaps greatest. “The emergence of Isis epitomises the shift in a technological arms race that does not necessarily favour the west any more,” says Nigel Inkster, director of transnational threats at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and former director of operations for MI6. “In many ways, modern [information technology] is now benefiting terrorist organisations more than it is the organisations fighting them.”

The Cheltenham-based agency is in the middle of a big internal restructuring programme. It is shaking up the way it deploys its analysts to put more emphasis on decryption and breaking into protected systems, compared with the broader sweep of mass data-collection activities it excelled in before.

A furious lobbying effort with Silicon Valley on behalf of the UK’s spies is also taking place, led by Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the veteran diplomat and former ambassador to the US.

Encryption standards are now so high that “brute force” assaults to crack communications scrambled with them are no longer viable, even for organisations as sophisticated as GCHQ. Furthermore, intelligence officials in the UK and the US now talk of more than 1m smartphone apps they need to be able to break into.