Counterterrorism

How a crippling shortage of analysts let the London Bridge attackers through

Although a detailed breakdown is difficult to ascertain, less than a quarter of MI5’s 4,000 staff are believed to be involved in analysis, and a far smaller number are sited among the 2,500 staff of MI6 – as few as 100, according to Davies. Although it is true that most of the 8,000 employees in GCHQ can be categorised as analysts, they have to evaluate a vast daily data stream that runs to countless terabytes. A single terabyte is the equivalent of 1,024 gigabytes, with a gigabyte the equivalent of 1.5 million WhatsApp messages

According to Davies, the number of analysts within defence intelligence, which has a counter-terrorism component, has been cut from 600 to 400 since the end of the cold war even as the terror threat has increased following UK military involvement in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. The number of analysts inside the Cabinet Office’s Joint Intelligence Organisation, which “leads on intelligence assessment and development of the UK intelligence community’s analytical capability”, currently stands at only 35.