Top UK spy: Twitter, Facebook are jihadi ‘command and control networks’

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In the latest warning from European officials concerned with online recruiting of fighters for extremist groups like Islamic State, the new director of Britains surveillance agency said social media have become the command and control networks of choice for terrorists. He also said that US-based technology companies must work more closely with security and law enforcement agencies worldwide.

GCHQ director Robert Hannigans comments highlight the tension between government intelligence and Internet privacy more than a year after US contractor Edward Snowden leaked evidence of US and British government surveillance.

Mr. Hannigan wrote in the Financial Times that the skills of the so-called Islamic State in usingthe Internet for recruitment have exceeded those from any previous terrorist group. It relies on social media, mobile technology, and apps like Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp to spread its message in a language their peers understand, he wrote.

GCHQ and its sister agencies, MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service, cannot tackle these challenges at scale without greater support from the private sector, including the largest US technology companies which dominate the web. I understand why they have an uneasy relationship with governments. They aspire to be neutral conduits of data and to sit outside or above politics. But increasingly their services not only host the material of violent extremism or child exploitation, but are the routes for the facilitation of crime and terrorism. However much they may dislike it, they have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us.

Social media companies including Twitter and Facebook have not publicly commented on Hannigans statements. According to the Financial Times, many US Internet companies have complied in the past with Western government requests for information. However, in the past 18 months US technology companies have become less co-operative with foreign intelligence agencies.

Intelligence leaks by Edward Snowden, whose findings like US spying on world leaders and foreign citizens were published in newspapers internationally, caused global uproar. According to the FT:

Three UK security officials said that US technology companies such as Google and Facebook have curbed the ability of UK intelligence to tap valuable electronic data in the wake of the Snowden leaks. The UK has had the most to lose [from Snowden], said one.

This isnt Britains first foray into Internet surveillance. Over the summer, the government passed emergency legislation to ensure communications companies kept records of e-mails, texts and phone calls for a year to help law-enforcement agencies track and catch terrorists and other criminals, Bloomberg reports.

The role of the Internet and social media in recruitment has becoming increasingly obvious with the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group, which is fighting in Iraq and Syria. The Christian Science Monitors Sara Miller Llana writes about their utility in drawing young Europeans to fight in Syria:

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Top UK spy: Twitter, Facebook are jihadi 'command and control networks'