Robert Hannigan spent his first day as the new head of the United Kingdom's information gathering body GCHQ doing, for a spy, something very unusual indeed: writing a newspaper article. Published in the Financial Times, Hannigan made a rather controversial accusation and offered an even more controversial solution. The accusation: large technology companies are in denial about the role of the internet in spreading terrorism. The solution: a "new deal" between governments and those companies – a closer, more intimate relationship, to get terrorist content off the internet and unmask the people behind it.
Hannigan has broken cover to deal with a new threat that has become depressingly obvious: ISIL. Much like on the battlefield, the Islamist militant group has claimed a slice of digital territory quite unlike anything seen before. Al Qaeda preferred to lurk in the shadows on hidden chat forums, only to emerge – and then, only briefly – with a carefully shot video from its leaders. These missives could go on for hours and were, if you forgot they were from the world’s most notorious men, pretty boring.
But recent research suggests ISIL is different. Online as much as offline, its members are not hiding out in caves. A recent study for The Atlantic magazine found that ISIL has "strong, organic support" on social media platforms, but also deploys deliberate strategies to control and increase it. Hundreds of accounts send thousands of Tweets every day. And it's not just noise. The author of that Atlantic piece, J M Berger, the editor of Intelwire.com, concluded that ISIL's fundraising machine has an important social media component, including active fundraisers, and donors.
Although much has been made of their supposed marketing genius, most of what they do is simply what many young men do online every day: making new connections, shooting slick videos and pumping out Tweets. It’s unclear whether and how far social media really pushes people into joining ISIL. King’s College London has conducted one of the most comprehensive studies of what motivates people to travel to Syria and Iraq to fight. They found that the role of social media is often exaggerated. Professor Peter Neumann, a co-author, concluded: “It’s all about networks in the real world.”
But there is clearly a problem. You might not elect to see it, but you’re only a click away from this violent online subculture; ISIL even has an official Twitter app – The Dawn of Glad Tidings. And it’s only a click away from you. The terror group via its followers has extended its reach, evaded censorship, swapped tactics, glorified murder and is now beginning to pollute the mainstream parts of social media that legitimate users, including children, use.
Current measures to tackle ISIL on social media are not working. Twitter has already banned 1,000 pro-ISIL accounts, and YouTube has removed thousands of videos. But it is much easier to upload content than remove it. The current approach is “whack-a-mole” – and the moles are winning. As Jamie Bartlett, author of The Dark Net, says: “A lot of the really dangerous stuff – the plots and logistics – is not on Twitter or Facebook any more.” It is safely on the dark net – a subterranean internet, only accessible with special software. Here, user anonymity is protected by encryption and other defences, although news of the arrest of 17 people using Tor, an encrypted anonymous browser, to access the dark net for illegal purposes, suggests that law enforcement might be making more progress here than on the surface web.
Intelligence agencies need the data and know-how of tech companies to develop new weapons to deny ISIL all the benefits of the internet that legitimate citizens enjoy. Inevitably, however, Hannigan’s suggested “new deal” to fight terrorism online will involve breaching people’s privacy. It will mean reading Facebook messages, building large detailed profiles of targets from lots of different sources and collecting and looking at very large bodies of data to establish patterns and trends.
In the past, tech companies have reacted furiously to the charge that they have cooperated with intelligence agencies beyond the minimum required by law. Apple has said that it has “never worked with the NSA to create a back door in any of our products”. Microsoft never provides customer data “on a voluntary basis”. Facebook, too, says “we do not provide any government agency with direct access to Facebook servers”. Instead, they have been fighting back – adding new layers of security to their products. Just a few days ago, Facebook announced a new service to allow users to connect to its service using Tor. Apple’s privacy policy is specifically designed to make it impossible for the company to turn over data to law enforcement, even with a warrant.
As the technology journalist Kate Knibbs has pointed out, writing on the technology website Gizmodo, tech companies’ anti-surveillance policies are a shrewd business move. Companies know that privacy matters to consumers, and many will opt for the service that looks most secure. As Microsoft’s chief lawyer, Brad Smith, put it: “People won’t use technology they don’t trust.”
Revelations by Edward Snowden, the former American intelligence contractor, painted the most detailed picture to date of surveillance in the internet age: a cobweb of programmes and information swaps to gather emails, photographs and logins, and how all this data flows around the internet. This included, reportedly, hacking into data held by the very tech companies with which Hannigan now wants to work. For intelligence agencies, this is an attempt to deal with overwhelming amounts of data. For too many citizens, privacy appears to be adrift, resulting in a huge deficit of trust.
Tech companies do not have faith in the public support for government surveillance. The Pew Research Center, a US-based think tank, asked more than 48,000 people in 44 countries about surveillance of citizens. A sizeable 81 per cent said it was unacceptable. The result is an adversarial relationship between tech companies trying to sell services and governments trying to collect data from them. As long as distrust in surveillance is high among the wider public in key economic markets, tech companies will be pulled away from any closer cooperation with governments.
It’s unlikely, then, that the tech companies will respond to pressure from Hannigan and others. But they might if they believe their customers are confident that their privacy is part of the picture. People broadly want intelligence agencies to have the powers that they need to keep society safe but they expect that these powers be explained and justified. It is here that the real failure lies. Western intelligence has struggled to participate in the public debate, especially in the wake of Snowden. They rarely talk about the threats faced, or what actions are taken or why. This vacuum is filled with wild speculation and corrosive suspicion instead.
None of this will be news to the intelligence agencies themselves and a second new deal is likely to slowly emerge: one between western intelligence agencies and the citizens they serve. European and US governments can be expected to put their agencies on a new, more public footing, better able to explain to people how both security and privacy are protected. Eventually. Hannigan’s article may well be the first step towards that.
Carl Miller is the co-founder and research director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, a London-based think tank.
