New network for intelligence agencies

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and GCHQ – the government's eavesdropping centre – are working on a new network to collaborate with other agencies.

Following the failure of phase two of the SCOPE programme, which would have delivered Top Secret intelligence to law enforcement, government departments and agencies, it was feared the intelligence agencies were not able to communicate well enough.

But according to the Intelligence and Security Committee's latest report, the SIS and GCHQ have started on an initiative to fix that. Called Collaboration in the Intelligence Community (CLiC), it is intended to be a "low-risk, inexpensive approach".

The report said CLiC will provide incremental changes to existing systems and will address the intelligence community's most urgent IT collaboration needs.

Former chief of SIS, Sir John Scarlett, told the committee: "CLiC is designed to shore up... some of the capability that SCOPE 2 would have given us... We are doing really quite well on this more modest CLiC programme, which is not being run out of the Cabinet Office, it is being run out of SIS and GCHQ... and it will be of community-wide value when it is delivered."

The first three areas CLiC will address are a link to HMRC so it can receive Top Secret intelligence and communicate securely via email; a secure mesasaging system called STRAP3A, which the report predicted will let GCHQ, SIS, MI5, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office (FCO), the Cabinet Office and the Home Office exchange Top Secret information by April; and an extension of a programme to share intelligence with the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

Details on expenditure and the contractor being worked with have been classified, although funding for CLiC came from GCHQ and SIS primarily, with the FCO and HMRC contributing too.

"CLiC appears to be progressing well so far. We are optimistic that it will deliver some of the IT solutions that the (far more costly) SCOPE Phase 2 programme was unable to. It is regrettable that this same practical and incremental approach was not adopted in the planning of the SCOPE programme," the ISC said.

The report also revealed that SCOPE technology is being slowly rolled out to overseas posts, with 40 posts already expected to be running the technology. Funding constraints have meant the FCO is unlikely to roll out any more for now, the report added.

Regarding the original failure of SCOPE 2, the committee said it is still investigating and said it would reveal its findings in its next report.