British secret service: internet companies must cooperate more

Internet companies must cooperate better with the intelligence services. That is what the new director of the GCHQ, a British secret service, advocates. According to him, the web is widely abused by terrorists, including the relatively new group IS.

Islamic State terrorists are widely using social media and chat apps like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp to reach people, writes new GCHQ director Robert Hannigan in an op-ed in the Financial Times. “The web has become a command and control network for terrorists,” Hannigan said. “We can’t solve these problems without more support from the private sector, including the big US tech companies that dominate the web.”

Hannigan says he is disturbed, among other things, by the ease with which the jihadists of the IS can spread images and messages, and how easily they can be found. He also sees a problem with the encryption used by the terrorists. According to Hannigan, terrorists have learned from the Snowden revelations and are adopting better encryption as a result.

Hannigan does not propose any concrete measures. He does write that ‘privacy has never been an absolute right’. “I think the customers of Internet companies would be better off with a better, lasting relationship between those companies and the secret services,” Hannigan writes. Whether that better relationship will come remains to be seen: since the Snowden revelations, technology companies prefer not to associate themselves with the secret services, because they fear that customers will no longer trust them.