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How private intelligence companies became the new spymasters
In a world awash with digital data, private intelligence companies now compete with state agencies, turning everyone into potential spies and transforming the age-old craft of espionage into a high-stakes technological arms race.
The firm, like others, also scrapes vast amounts of data from the dark web – a part of the internet that can only be accessed using special software – collects millions of images daily, extracts visible text to find patterns, and hoovers up corporate records. The cameras in Taiwan and South Korea are among more than one billion around the world, forming a metastasising network of technical surveillance – visual and electronic, ground-level and overhead, real-time and retrospective – that has made life far harder for intelligence officers and the agents they need to develop, recruit and meet. America found that its spy satellites, designed to watch the Soviet Union, were in the wrong orbit to point at the South Atlantic (‘Nobody ever thought there’d be a damn war in the Falklands for God’s sake’, noted Robert Gates, later the CIA director).
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