British intelligence agencies sign deal with Amazon cloud service AWS
The British intelligence services have signed a contract with Amazon cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to a media report. As the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing circles familiar with the proceedings, the deal involves the storage of confidential data.
£1 billion over the next decade.
The goal is to make data analytics and artificial intelligence more useful for spying by intelligence agencies GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, as well as other government agencies, the FT reported. According to the report, the contract is worth between £500 million and £1 billion over the next decade.
The cybersecurity agency GCHQ is leading the deal. The agency had wanted to find a British cloud provider, but came to the conclusion that none of them had comparable capabilities to AWS. According to the report, the data is stored exclusively in the UK. Amazon does not have access to it, it said.
The British government would not comment directly on the report. However, a spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told reporters Tuesday that in the area of national security, “private sector technology has been used for decades to ensure the security of the country.” It was “obviously an absolute priority to ensure the security of these technologies,” the spokesman said. Moreover, the same protections would apply to classified information regardless of the technology provider.
Amazon had agreed to build its own facility
The ex-chief of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Center, Ciaran Martin, told the FT that the collaboration would allow British intelligence agencies to “get information from vast amounts of data within minutes, rather than weeks or months.”
University of Surrey computer security expert Alan Woodward said he thought it likely that Amazon had agreed to build its own facility in the U.K., which would be accessible only to the intelligence services. He also pointed out that the U.K. and the U.S. are close allies. It is not a matter of “having data on the Internet,” he said. Rather, he said, it was a practical decision on the part of the British.
In 2013, the US intelligence agency CIA had already concluded a cloud data deal with AWS. In Europe, meanwhile, many countries are reluctant to entrust sensitive data to US Internet companies.
The UK’s cooperation with Amazon is likely to reignite the debate over the country’s sovereignty over its strategically important industries. The British government had previously excluded Chinese communications provider Huawei from its 5G network. Currently, there are reportedly plans to exclude Chinese operator CGN from the proposed Sizewell C nuclear power plant.