Cyberspook Tomlinson Defiantly Speaks His Mind

IDG News Service - Rome
Western intelligence agencies face little difficulty in intercepting Internet communications, but analyzing all of the traffic is another matter, said Richard Tomlinson, a former officer of Britain's foreign intelligence service, MI6.
Tomlinson has undertaken a five-year cyberwar against his former employer after being dismissed - unjustly, he insists - in 1995.
In an effort to force British authorities to grant him a hearing before a tribunal over his dismissal, Tomlinson threatened to post a damaging account of his time at MI6 on the Internet. He is also suspected of having posted a list of 116 names of alleged MI6 officers on a Web site a year ago.
Tomlinson spent six months in prison after he was convicted of breaching the Official Secrets Act by sending a book proposal to an Australian publisher and revealing secret information - including an alleged British plot to murder Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic - to the press.
Tomlinson denied responsibility for publishing the MI6 officers' names and said his threat to post a memoir was a bluff, which he now regrets. But he said the battle for a hearing by an independent tribunal is still his main focus.
"Technically, it's easy to gather information, but you need human minds to process it. There just isn't the time," he said, referring to government efforts to monitor his e-mail.
"With people like me, they undoubtedly look at all my e-mail" Tomlinson said of his former employers. "They can't crack PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) without a huge amount of effort." If he didn't use PGP, the secret services might not have to confiscate his PC so often, Tomlinson said.
Few people use the encryption programs on Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook because they know Microsoft gave the escrow key to the U.S. government, he said.
Web Snooping Senseless?
The authorities "want the writers of PGP to give up the key, but then other programs will come along," Tomlinson said. "You can't defeat encryption. It's something the intelligence services have got to learn to live with. They will never defeat it. That's why it's so senseless to spend a fortune snooping on the Internet."
The British government announced last year plans for a $30 million unit of code-cracking specialists to monitor Internet traffic to fight against crime and terrorism. According to published reports, one in 500 telephone connections to the Internet - 20 times the European average - would be monitored. Tomlinson said he doubts that crime fighting is the real motive.
"It's really the intelligence services that are thedriving force behind these initiatives, not the battle against child pornography," he said. When he worked at MI6, it was actively recruiting information technology specialists. "But they command such high salaries, they tend to bust the pay structure," he said.
Willan writes for the IDG News Service in Rome.