Philo of Byzantium, an inventor of the third century BC, described how crushed gallnuts, dissolved in water, could make invisible ink. Technology has shaped spycraft for millennia, but today it is having an unprecedented effect. The internet enables covert action on a grand scale. Biometric border controls impede spies operating abroad. Smartphones haemorrhage secrets.
Some conclude that intelligence services in their current form are obsolete. Why steal secrets when open and commercial sources such as satellite imagery and phone-location data can expose mischief? Who needs human spooks when it is so hard to protect their identities and so easy to snoop digitally?
In truth, intelligence needs both the old and new ways. Human intelligence is getting harder, costlier and riskier. Yet, for all that, it remains essential. That is not just because there are still some things that only an agent can do, such as read the mood in the corridors of the Kremlin. It is also because human and technical operations are intertwined. When an unknown operator, presumably a state, recently attempted to insert a surreptitious backdoor into a vital piece of software called XZ Utils, they did so by spending years pretending to be a well-meaning volunteer on the project.
Public and commercial sources are increasingly valuable. Around 90% of NATO’s intelligence on cyber threats now comes from private firms, for instance. But the real value is derived by blending open and secret sources. That is harder than it sounds. For good reason, spy agencies have long maintained a gap between the classified and unclassified worlds. Now it has to be bridged.
Intelligence services will need top-secret cloud servers. Currently these are built largely by American or Chinese firms, which spy agencies from most other countries do not trust. Within and between countries, those agencies will often want to share data that are now siloed. And they will need to experiment with artificial intelligence to exploit it all, balancing the hallucinatory habits of today’s large language models against the huge promise of future ones.
Whereas the secret world once far outstripped the private sector, it is now often the reverse. Spy agencies will have to work with companies at the cutting-edge and recruit talent that may balk at the prospect of working in a windowless room without access to phones or the internet.
More broadly, a world in which digital technology has seeped into everything—into everyone’s pockets, power plants and the cameras that watch over government buildings—is one in which access to data becomes central to the intelligence contest between America, China and other big powers. At the moment, that is a lopsided fight.
Chinese hackers hoover up data from around the world, giving them potential leverage over their adversaries. American and European intelligence services also collect a lot. But they are far more constrained by law. It is easier for a private firm to collect bulk data, such as phone-location logs, than for a state agency to do so.
Data brokers who buy and sell private data, often to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, need tighter rules and a brighter light shone on their often murky business. States which bar their agencies from collecting and fusing data about rivals will blind themselves. But those that allow such activities without proper legal authority and robust oversight do not just stomp on individual rights, they also risk provoking a backlash, as after Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013.
It is tempting to dismiss the technologies of spycraft as just an entertaining diversion from real geopolitics. In fact, the two are intertwined. America’s interception of Russian war plans in 2021 allowed allies to prepare for the invasion of Ukraine that followed. Israel’s failure to foresee Hamas’s assault on October 7th was a national calamity. If China chooses to invade Taiwan, intelligence will be crucial to denying it the element of surprise. Forewarned is forearmed.
© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
