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'Google effect' means spies work harder, says ex-GCHQ chief
The rise of the web and Google means Britain’s spies have to work harder to produce genuinely secret intelligence, according to Sir David Pepper, the former director of GCHQ.
He said “the Google effect” of so much information being readily available online had “very substantially” raised the “threshold for producing intelligence” for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
“Nobody wants the easy stuff anymore and there is no point spending effort and money collecting it,” said Sir David, who was giving the annual Mountbatten Memorial Lecture at the Institution of Engineering and Technology.
“Many of the sort of things for which [officials] once would have turned to the intelligence agencies are now readily available to them online,” he said.
“Thanks to Google Maps and Streeview anyone can today see photographic detail of far away countries which hitherto would have been available only through secret and highly sophisticated national satellites.
“Intelligence producers have had to become very sensitive to this phenomenon and very careful not to put effort into producing intelligence that purports to be secret which is in fact not secret at all.”
Sir David retired as director of GCHQ in 2008 after five years in charge of Britain’s electronic spying efforts. He oversaw a major shake-up of the 5,000-strong agency that aimed to transform its Cold War structure to one “fit for the internet age”.
His predecessor in the job, Sir David Omand, aspeaking after the lecture, agreed that the web and Google had “raised the bar” for spies.
Sir David Pepper also said “the Google effect” meant that officials who use secret intelligence were demanding it quicker than ever before.
“If the intelligence readers are used to getting information online very fast they’re going to expect the intelligence agencies to be able to do much the same thing,” he said.
But online information was offering opportunities as well as challenges to those in the espionage trade, Sir David said.
“You can find out a lot about potential spies without ever meeting them, simply by looking at their online footprints,” he said.
GCHQ now deals with so much data that its vast halls of computers in Cheltenham use many of the same techniques and technologies as Google uses to index the web.
Sir David, who now sits on the advisory board of the French defence giant Thales, also spoke about the growing threat to national security from cyber crime, cyber espionage and cyber attacks that disrupt physical infrastructure. He said the forthcoming update to the government's cyber security strategy should include lessons on internet security for school children.