Spy agencies including MI5 and MI6 strike deal with AMAZON

There was fury today that Britain’s most sensitive secrets will now be entrusted to Amazon’s cloud after all three spy agencies appointed the controversial US tech giant to host their data despite a wave of scandals about the firm’s business practices. 

GCHQ led moves to sign up to the secure system, which will also be used by MI5 and MI6, as well as other government departments such as the Ministry of Defence during joint operations, according to the Financial Times.

The deal – worth as much as £1billion – will ignite concerns over sovereignty given that vast amounts of the country’s most secret data will now be hosted by a single foreign company that has been implicated in a raft of scandals, from claims it hired detectives who spied on workers and social justice groups, to criticism bosses under-paid drivers and rigged search results. 

These allegations come on top of existing condemnation over the ‘hellish’ conditions in some Amazon warehouses, as exposed by a series of undercover investigations. In 2018, ambulances were called to one of its UK warehouses once every two days as workers collapsed and suffered broken bones. 

Today’s news also coincides with increased concern about the power US Big Tech now wields over the UK – after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen blasted the network for poisoning public discourse due to its algorithm ‘prioritising’ hateful content. 

Today, critics took to social media to pan the deal, with one user writing: ‘I thought sovereignty was everything to Tory Brexit Britain so why give all our secrets to a foreign company?’ 

Spectator editor Fraser Nelson called the news ‘very worrying’, adding: ‘It underlines the power wielded by Silicon Valley firms who now hold huge power over the political debate.’ 

Advocates say the agreement will boost the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence for the UK’s intelligence agencies. 

It was signed this year with AWS, Amazon’s cloud service unit, and the data of all the agencies will be held in Britain, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the discussions.

The sources said Amazon – founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos – will not have any access to information held on the cloud platform.

But other nations have taken a different approach to the UK, and earlier this year the French backed the creation of a ‘sovereign cloud’, which will be used to handle sensitive public information. 

It is understood the new UK deal will allow spies within the intelligence agencies to share data more easily from field locations overseas.

This will also enable the agencies to use specialist applications such as speech recognition software which can ‘spot’ and translate particular voices from hours’ worth of recordings.

Reports suggest the use of AWS will also enable the agencies to conduct quicker searches on each other’s datastores.

Industry experts estimate the deal could be up to £500million to £1billion over the next 10 years. 

GCHQ said it would not comment on reports about its relationships with tech suppliers and AWS – which is a lesser known part of Amazon but is far more valuable than the online retail operation – declined to comment.

Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, said the cloud deal would allow the security services ‘to get information from huge amounts of data in minutes, rather than in weeks and months’ but dismissed the idea it enabled them to store more data.

In February, Britain’s cyber spies at GCHQ said they had fully embraced artificial intelligence to uncover patterns in vast amounts of global data to counter hostile disinformation and snare child abusers.

GCHQ has been using basic forms of AI such as translation technology for years but is now stepping up its use, partly in response to the use of AI by hostile states and partly due to the data explosion that makes it effective.

Yesterday, GCHQ Director Jeremy Fleming told a conference the number of ransomware attacks had doubled across the UK in 2021, compared with last year.

He told the Cipher Briefing: ‘We’ve seen twice as many attacks this year as last year in the UK – but the reason is it proliferating is because it works. It just pays.

‘Criminals are making very good money from it and are often feeling that that’s largely uncontested.’ 

In April, Mr Fleming said that Britain faced a ‘moment of reckoning’ in the race for technological supremacy and must adapt or risk falling prey to China.

He called for the country to evolve like an animal in a changing habitat as the ‘global digital environment’ comes under threat from foreign adversaries like China and Russia.

He also warned that the digital dominance of hostile states like China threatens our future prosperity and security.