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 The new director of Britain's GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, said Twitter
Inc, Facebook Inc and WhatsApp were in denial about their unintended
role as "the command and control networks of choice for terrorists".
Islamic State militants are harnessing the power of the Internet to
create a militant network with near global reach just a quarter of a
century since the creation of the World Wide Web, Hannigan said.
"The challenge to governments and their intelligence agencies is
huge -- and it can only be met with greater co-operation from
technology companies," Hannigan wrote in the Financial Times
newspaper.
"If they are to meet this challenge, it means coming up with better
arrangements for facilitating lawful investigation by security and
law enforcement agencies than we have now."
Twitter and Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, declined immediate
comment before U.S business hours. GCHQ also declined to comment on
the article.
Such a strong public warning from one of the West's most powerful
spies indicates the gravity of the perceived threat and a sense of
frustration felt by many spies about the damage done by former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Media reports based on previously top secret documents stolen by
Snowden, a U.S. citizen who now lives in Moscow, laid bare the
extent of American and British surveillance, including demands spies
made to telephone and technology companies.
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, GCHQ, which stands for
Government Communications Headquarters, was accused by privacy
groups and some lawmakers of the widespread illegal monitoring of
electronic communications.
British ministers denied any illegality and top spies dismissed any
sinister intent, saying they sought only to defend the liberties of
Western democracies.
The director general of the MI5 Security Service, Andrew Parker,
warned last year that the revelations were a gift to terrorists
because they had exposed GCHQ's ability to track, listen and watch
plotters.
"Young foreign fighters have learnt and benefited from the leaks of
the past two years," Hannigan said.
"ISIS IT DEPARTMENT"
GCHQ, MI5 and Britain's foreign spy service, MI6, need greater
support from the private sector, said Hannigan, who singled out U.S.
technology companies in particular. No British-based companies were
named.
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Hannigan said Islamic State militants, who have seized swathes of
land in Syria and Iraq, were harnessing the power of technology in a
new and dangerous way.
While al Qaeda mainly hid in the shadows of the Internet using it as
a modern drop box or secret ink, Islamic State is noisily using it
to advertise itself, radicalize new recruits and intimidate with
grotesque videos of beheadings, he said.
"The ISIS (Islamic State) leadership understands the power this
gives them with a new generation," Hannigan said, adding that
militants had used World Cup and Ebola hashtags on Twitter messages
to pitch their views to a wider audience.
"The extremists of ISIS use messaging and social media services such
as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp," he said.
Hannigan cast GCHQ, which fishes for intelligence in the world's
cyber oceans from a futuristic building called the doughnut in the
western English spa-town of Cheltenham, as hindered by technology
companies and a mistaken assumption that privacy was an absolute
right.
"It can seem that some technology companies are in denial about its
misuse," he said. "I suspect most ordinary users of the internet ...
do not want the media platforms they use with their friends and
families to facilitate murder or child abuse."
Emma Carr, director of the Big Brother Watch civil liberties group,
said technology companies had assisted spy agencies and that the
government had failed to provide evidence to substantiate claims the
companies were being obstructive.
"The government and agencies have consistently failed to provide
evidence that Internet companies are being actively obstructive,"
Carr said.
(This story has been refiled to add dropped word in paragraph 10)
(Additional reporting by Shivam Srivastava in Bangalore and Michael
Holden in London; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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