There has been a relative decline over the last few decades in the gathering of human intelligence — often referred to as HUMINT, which broadly covers agents and assets run by the FBI and CIA in the U.S. and MI5 and MI6 in the U.K. But that drop has been matched by a meteoric rise in its digital cousin, signals intelligence — named SIGINT, covered by the work of Britain’s GCHQ and America’s NSA.
The automated bulk sharing of this digital intelligence has become more important given that human intelligence “doesn’t scale in the same way,” the same former intelligence source said. “That is deeply, deeply integrated, and it’s deeply disruptive to disentangle that,” they added.
Ears
Britain still has important assets that are of use to America — chief among them its listening posts. These are military and intelligence facilities, often overseas, used to monitor communications. The details of listening posts are sometimes classified, with their locations, capabilities or which nations they monitor kept secret for national security reasons.
But the crucial data they collect makes it unlikely the U.S. would ever leave Five Eyes, according to Neil Melvin, director of international security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defense and security think tank. “For example, the one in Cyprus [Ayios Nikolaos] — the U.S. relies on that for the East Mediterranean, which is very important because of Israel,” he pointed out.
If the U.S. left the alliance, “they would also have to replace some very expensive assets that the U.K. has,” as well as U.S. signals and intelligence bases located in Britain, such as RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire — referred to by locals as “the golf balls.”
One figure in the U.K. intelligence community now working in the private sector said that listening posts are best understood as “hoovering up huge amounts of raw data” such as internet, telephone and radio traffic, and then “picking through it using machine learning or AI to pick up the signal from the noise” — such as key words, voices or addresses. “Only after that sifting does it really ever get in front of the eyes of a human being,” they added.
