“In five years’ time, there will be two sorts of intelligence services – those that understand this fact and have prospered and those that don’t have haven’t”.
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Advances in facial recognition and biometrics, the rise of social media and the sheer amount of personal information in circulation each impede covert activities in their own way.
The UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) will be taking on 1,000 extra staff by the year 2020 as they expand to deal with a world obsessed with internet and technology.
It comes after the MI6 chief Alex younger made a rare public appearance, saying the intelligence service was focused on recruiting officers of the “highest moral literacy”.
MI6 does not make public the number of employees.
MI6 is set to secure the lion’s share of additional people for the intelligence services promised by the government in its 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review.
According to the BBC, among the tech troubling the spooks is facial recognition technology, which has now “reached the point where images – for example of an intelligence officer travelling under an assumed identity – can be easily reverse searched to find pictures posted online under their real identity, before they joined MI6 or the CIA”.
The scale of challenge faced by spymasters became clearer in 2010, following the assassination of a Palestinian militant in Dubai by a team believed to have been sent there by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence arm.
Mr Younger appeared at a conference in the USA alongside CIA Director John Brennan and their Australian and Afghan counterparts. He also warned the threat from groups like the Islamic State (Isis) is likely to continue well into the future.
He added the Snowden leaks had made the work of MI6 and GCHQ more problematic, including in their relationship with technology firms.
‘The real issue for us has been the effect that this has had on the levels of trust between the intelligence communities internationally and the technology community, where I think that the right and proper response to the common threats that face us is through community of effort and teamwork between those different groups, ‘ he said.
Britain’s spy agency is reportedly to get nearly 1,000 new staff as MI6 chief warns the “enduring” threat from global terrorism will continue for decades to come.
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