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DODIIS 2024 — Members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance want a Top Secret cloud environment that all five countries can operate on, though it’s just an “ambitious,” aspirational goal for now.
Officials from each member nation said here Monday that with such a cloud environment, the allies would be able to seamlessly share data with each other, which would turn information technology interoperability into a reality.
Furthermore, in their vision data would be properly “tagged,” meaning it has metadata that helps identify who and where the data came from, Brig. Gen. Eric Vandenberg, director of the general intelligence enterprise for the Canadian Department of National Defence, told an audience at the Department of Defense Intelligence Information System conference.
“Not only would this cloud be a Top Secret cloud, but it would be classification agnostic as well, because the data is all tagged, because all of my users all have the correct digital identities, I can store all the data in the cloud. Everyone can access what they’re allowed to access when they’re allowed to access it. It would enable interoperability,” Vandenberg said.
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Jack Maxton, chief information officer for defence intelligence at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, said his top wish is the same as Vandenberg’s, along with cutting down “unnecessary bureaucracy.”
The Five Eyes group already shares intelligence far more readily than most nations do with their foreign counterparts, but Maxton said bureaucratic restrictions in place still “are adding very little value, either to our security or to our intelligence mission, but because they’ve been there for so long, we’ve just got really, really comfortable.”
Austin Martin, the assistant Director for Five Eyes IT integration within the American Defense Intelligence Agency’s Chief Information Office, reiterated Vandenberg and Maxton’s wish for such a network, also speaking on the role of data tagging in creating an interoperable environment.
He said if he could solve any problem within the Five Eyes today it would be fixing the siloed data so it can exist on one cloud, which includes “fine-grained tagging data” throughout the “entirety of the Five Eyes alliance and intelligence enterprise community.” He added that he thinks the US had made “great strides in recent times” in this area, but “there’s a lot more work to do.”
Brig. Andrew McBaron, director general of intelligence data and targeting for the Austrialian Department of Defence, said a five-nation Top Secret may seem “ambitious” right now, but other Australian officials revealed months ago that Canberra is already working on a three-nation set up. As Breaking Defense reported in December, Australia’s top intelligence official revealed then the development of a “Top Secret” intelligence cloud that is planned to be interoperable with US and UK spy networks.
Though officials did not say when that cloud will be first launched, they said that it will “transform” how Australian intelligences work together, and with the US and UK.
