Amazon Agrees To Host Top-Secret Material With UK Spy Agencies

Share Us

701
Amazon Agrees To Host Top-Secret Material With UK Spy Agencies
26 Oct 2021
7 min read

News Synopsis

According to the Financial Times, Britain's spy services have handed Amazon Web Services a contract to house confidential material in a pact aimed at increasing the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence for espionage. AWS, Amazon.com Inc's cloud service business, inked the deal this year. Even though AWS is based in the United States, all the agencies' data will be stored in the United Kingdom, according to individuals familiar with the agreement. According to those persons, Amazon will have no access to the information stored on the cloud platform.

The acquisition of a high-security cloud system was championed by Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency, and it will be utilized by sister services MI5 and MI6, as well as other government departments such as the Ministry of Defence, during joint operations. The new cloud service, which is designed to securely host top-secret information, will make it easier for spies to share data from field locations around the world and power specialist applications like speech recognition, which can detect and translate specific voices from hours of intercept recordings. Given that a large quantity of the UK's most sensitive data would be hosted by a single US tech firm. The arrangement is likely to raise questions about sovereignty.

According to four sources acquainted with the negotiations, the deal was inked this year and is valued between £500 million and £1 billion over the next ten years, according to industry experts. The specifics, on the other hand, are highly guarded and were never meant to be made public.

TWN In-Focus