Jamie Burnham

As part of a week-long series focused on Mapping China’s Ambitions, The Cipher Brief is partnering with Harvard Research Fellow and former British diplomat Jamie Burnham to explore China’s threat vectors, how it is organizing to win, what a government ecosystem looks like and the impact that international collaboration will have in the future.

Today, Burnham focuses on the importance of international collaboration.  Earlier in The Cipher Brief,  Burnham explored organizing a government data ecosystem, how China is organizing to win and China’s broader ambitions and threat vectors.

The scale and transnational nature of the challenge posed by China demands greater utility from the network of international relationships that have evolved since the Second World War.  The most well-established international information-sharing partnership is known colloquially as the Five Eyes: US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, describes a degree of mutual trustworthiness which comes ‘from a long history of respect for the sensitivities of the other, demonstrating that commitments entered into and restrictions imposed will be honoured.’

Data technologies are, however, shifting the information landscape at pace.  Beyond SIGINT, international data sharing has not evolved either as quickly as the technologies might permit nor the new operational drivers demand.  Avril Haines, the new Director of National Intelligence, argues that ‘U.S. intelligence must re-imagine its closest liaison partnerships from ones centered on intelligence sharing to ones of intelligence generation, building a full-spectrum intelligence partnership that jointly develops technology and executes tech-enabled intelligence missions.’

Institutional architecture is slow to develop even within national boundaries.  In an international context, change is inhibited by conflicting policy, legal, institutional and cultural interests.  These can often be exacerbated by poor mutual understanding of issues and a lack of shared vision of Mission.  Any sharing tends to be bilateral and ad-hoc, with a high degree of wariness as to how information might be misused.  Absence of institutional architecture prevents sharing as a norm.   Opportunities are missed. High advantage secondary datasets (for example, network analysis) may not benefit from partners’ existing knowledge base.  New analytical techniques or innovations, such as machine learning algorithms, are not shared.

DEVELOPING A DATA ‘BACKBONE’

International data partnerships must form part of the necessary mutual response to the challenge of China (and other state actors).  A data-sharing ‘backbone’ may secure the following operational benefits:

• Increase efficiency by reducing duplication of data collection, cleaning and ingestion and adopting a ‘data only once’ approach;
• Encourage sharing of high advantage secondary data sets, such as PRC acquisition networks;
• Developing a common understanding of risks;
• Improve cross domain collaboration by more readily fusing different data collection techniques to deliver impact;
• Encourage innovation and sharing of data exploitation techniques and analytical tooling.

While there are technological and infrastructure challenges, these are unlikely to prove the most significant barriers – particularly as migration to cloud-based services will force common technology standards and secure data highways.  Greater inhibition is likely to sit in the following spheres:

• Policy.  Existing institutional arrangements are robust and well proven.  Undermining protocols and trust on existing intelligence sharing arrangements would create significant risk and undermine consent for an emergent approach.
• Legal.  Five Eyes partners have different privacy and data governance laws, with much higher judicial oversight and regulation in those jurisdictions that employ the ‘Westminster’ system of government (UK, AUS, CAN, NZ).
• Governance.  The functions of Chief Data/Information Officer would normally be required to ensure common standards and appropriate investment.  However, a collaborative governance system can be established, to ensure mutual inter-operability.

Outside the 5 EYES network, there may be opportunities to establish non-traditional data partnerships, recognizing some of the barriers of trust and regulatory divergence.  These may include entities within the Asian economies, such as Japan’s Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI) which has a deep knowledge reservoir of commercial intelligence.  With the departure of the UK from the European Union, there is greater freedom to establish an information regime which supports the protection of international trade and intellectual property.