Shutterstock/bluebay. All rights reserved.Ask someone to describe how spies share information, and you get descriptions of manila envelopes being passed silently between men in trenchcoats. While no doubt this occasionally still happens, it does not reflect the modern-day industrial-scale exchange of raw communications intelligence, automatically synced between top secret servers hosted around the world that account for the overwhelming majority of intelligence exchanges.
The Snowden revelations brought the concerns about the lawfulness of such intelligence exchange onto the front pages of newspapers everywhere. With the introduction of the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, an opportunity to bring this hitherto shadowy practice under the rule of law, has so far been missed. It is vitally important that it isn't.
Extensive degree of sharing
Intelligence-sharing, like intelligence collection is not a new thing. Since there have been intelligence agencies collecting secret intelligence, information has been shared, exchanged and distributed between partners where their interests align.
