Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Secret Service Closes Deal
Britain’s spies rely on Amazon
Amazon is a big player in the cloud business with its AWS brand. The British secret service now also wants to use the company’s services. London’s spies are already using artificial intelligence to examine huge amounts of data.
According to a newspaper report, the UK’s espionage authorities have hired Amazon Web Services (AWS) to process confidential material. The aim is to make greater use of data analysis and artificial intelligence for espionage, wrote the Financial Times.
In the agreement with Amazon’s cloud service unit, the data of all authorities on site in Great Britain will be saved, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the conversations. The British espionage agency GCHQ had advocated a high-security cloud system to be used by sister services MI5 and MI6 as well as other government agencies in joint operations, the report said.
As early as February, the bugging service announced that they were using artificial intelligence to uncover patterns in huge amounts of data around the world in order to expose disinformation and child molesters. When asked by Reuters news agency, GCHQ said it would not comment on reports of its business relationships with technology providers. AWS was initially not available for comment.
Amazon is a leading provider of cloud services for start-ups and established companies through its AWS division. The company’s market share is reportedly over 30 percent. The division recently brought in two thirds of the Group’s operating profit. AWS boss Andy Jassy only took over the post of CEO at Amazon in July, replacing founder Jeff Bezos.