UK secret services choose the Amazon cloud
In the UK, the US company Amazon Web Services will host classified material in the cloud system. All the details
Amazon will hold data for UK intelligence agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ on its cloud.
The UK Secret Service has awarded a contract with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud division of the US giant, to host classified material. The deal is aimed at enhancing the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence for espionage.
The Financial Times was the first to report the news.
As the British newspaper points out, GCHQ (the British spy and counter-espionage agency) had supported the acquisition of a high-security cloud system. This will also be used by its sister services, MI5 and MI6. Other government departments, such as the Ministry of Defense, would also use the system during joint operations.
The deal, estimated by industry experts to be worth between £ 500m and £ 1bn over the next decade, was signed this year with Amazon.com's AWS cloud services unit, according to the Ft , citing people. who are familiar with discussions.
The deal with Amazon is likely to raise sovereignty concerns because the UK's most secretive data will be hosted by a single US tech company, the Guardian points out.
In fact, we remind you that in the United States the Cloud Act is in force, which obliges American service providers to communicate the data they keep to the authorities, even if these data are hosted outside the United States.
All the details.
THE CLOUD CONTRACT ASSIGNED TO AMAZON WEB SERVICES
According to the FT , the new cloud contract awarded to AWS will allow spies to share data internally more easily and to use artificial intelligence to recognize and translate speech. It will also allow GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 to conduct faster searches in their respective databases.
DATA STORED IN GREAT BRITAIN
The agency data will be stored in the UK, in Amazon's data centers.
WHAT ABOUT ACCESS TO DATA?
According to sources in the British newspaper, UK intelligence agencies have said that Amazon will not have access to the data, although the company may be able to glean some information from usage habits.
Without forgetting that as a US company, Amazon must comply with the Cloud Act, approved in 2018 in the US, which obliges American service providers to communicate the data they store to the authorities. Even if this data is hosted outside the US.
FEARS RAISED
Immediate reactions to the news of the contract.
Gus Hosein, the executive director of Privacy International, told the Financial Times that there are many things that parliament, regulators and the public need to know about the deal.
"This is yet another worrying public-private partnership, agreed in secret," said Hosein. “If this contract goes through, Amazon will be positioned as the go-to cloud provider for the world's intelligence agencies. Amazon has to answer for itself which country security services it would be willing to work for ”.
EVEN THE CIA RELIES ON AWS
As the British newspaper recalls, Amazon got its first major public contract in 2013, with the CIA. The $ 600 million deal was followed by dozens of other US military and surveillance contracts.
However, AWS failed to grab the maxi contract for the Pentagon's Jedi program, awarded by Microsoft in 2019. After the legal dispute initiated by the giant founded by Jeff Bezos, Defense Department officials terminated the maxi contract $ 10 billion this summer .
Therefore Microsoft will not (for now) work on the Pentagon cloud computing as part of the Jedi project.
In fact, the Pentagon announced that it would start over with a new project.
The decision will open the new cloud project, renamed Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, to all qualified bidders, Pentagon officials said. In addition to Microsoft and Amazon, Google , Oracle and IBM could also participate.
SOVEREIGNTY PROBLEMS?
Finally, returning to the contract signed by the UK intelligence agencies, it can be said that London is going against the trend of the EU.
As the FT recalls, the French government this year supported the creation of a new "sovereign cloud" that will be used by the country's public sector to manage sensitive data using government-approved security methods. Dubbed Bleu, it is expected to join the Gaia-X project, which aims to foster a European cloud industry that can compete with US companies like Google and AWS.
And also in Italy the race to win the public-private partnership for the creation of the National Strategic Pole has begun. That is the infrastructure for the cloud management of data and applications of the Public Administration. The proposals presented by the Cdp consortium, Leonardo, Sogei and Tim (a Newco with Tim at 45% and the remaining front at 55%) and by the tandem Almaviva and Aruba arrived at the beginning of the month and the announcement of Maximo Ibarra, new CEO of Engineering company .
Furthermore, the Italian defense will also migrate to the cloud . On 4 August, the multiannual programmatic document (Dpp) for Defense for the three-year period 2021-2023 was published. The latter envisages the launch of new joint interest programs and among these the acquisition of capacity for data sharing based on the Defense Cloud concept.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/i-servizi-segreti-del-regno-unito-scelgono-il-cloud-amazon/ on Tue, 26 Oct 2021 14:21:11 +0000.