US tech firms offering terrorists 'networks of choice': British official

London

ONE of Britain's highest-ranking intelligence officials on Tuesday castigated US companies that dominate the Internet for providing the "command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals" and challenged the companies to find a better balance between privacy and security.

The statements were made by Robert Hannigan, the newly appointed director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain's electronic intelligence agency. They were among the most pointed in a campaign by intelligence services in Britain and the United States against pressure to rein in their digital surveillance following disclosures by the US former contractor Edward J Snowden.

In the wake of those leaks, technology companies have grown increasingly reluctant to comply with government surveillance programs. That, along with the increased use of sophisticated encryption products and regulation around the world intended to bolster the privacy rights of individuals, has led to intelligence officials asserting that the reaction to the leaks by Snowden is harming national security by allowing terrorist groups to communicate freely for recruitment, fundraising and planning.

Mr Hannigan, in an opinion article in the Financial Times, singled out the Islamic State as one "whose members have grown up on the Internet" and are "exploiting the power of the web to create a jihadi threat with near-global reach". In a speech two weeks ago, the director of the FBI, James B Comey, said that the "post-Snowden pendulum" had "gone too far". On Monday, Michael S Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, took a less confrontational approach, telling an audience of students and faculty members at Stanford University that "a fundamentally strong Internet is in the best interest of the US". Increasingly encrypted products and services are "a challenge", he said. "And we'll deal with it."

But he also pushed for better sharing of information between the intelligence community and private technology companies. Legislation that would set up a formal information-sharing system has stalled in Congress in the face of objections from the private sector.

Technology companies, which harvest customer data for commercial uses, reacted cautiously on Tuesday, generally seeking to avoid any role that would make them agents of government intelligence gathering.

"It's such a slippery slope with these types of requests," said Stefan Weitz, director of search at Microsoft. "If you say yes to one request, more will inevitably start to come in. At what point do you stop?"

Technology companies continue to cooperate with governments in some ways. In Britain, for example, government agencies have regular contact with Google and its YouTube subsidiary, and can get expedited responses when they raise concerns about terror recruitment videos or images of beheadings, often resulting in quick action to take down the content in question.

But Mr Hannigan's comments, calling for "a new deal between democratic governments and the technology companies in the area of protecting our citizens", seemed to urge a further reappraisal of the balance between civil liberties and national security. Britain, like many other European nations, has been increasingly concerned about online recruitment of potential fighters from within its borders by Islamic State and other radical groups.

Mr Hannigan's statement drew opposition from civil liberties groups.

"It is not for the head of a powerful intelligence agency to wave his arms and expect citizens of a democracy to gladly give up their rights," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research group in Washington, DC. "His responsibility is to protect their freedoms."

In the past, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which have broken with the Islamic State, "saw the Internet as a place to disseminate material anonymously or meet in 'dark spaces'", Mr Hannigan wrote, while the Islamic State "has embraced the web as a noisy channel in which to promote itself, intimidate people and radicalise new recruits". His opinion article referred specifically to messaging and social media sites and apps such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp.

"There is no need for today's would-be jihadis to seek out restricted websites with secret passwords: They can follow other young people posting their adventures in Syria as they would anywhere else," he wrote. NYT