“The security world has grown and expanded; it’s been a story of constant change and constant growth, and now there are more calls for change in the face of the horrors that happened in the last few weeks.”
These were the words of Dame Stella Rimington, former director general of MI5 and opening keynote speaker at Infosecurity Europe 2107 in London today.
In her session ‘Open Secret’ Rimington reflected on a fascinating career at MI5 and discussed on how the arrival of terrorism dramatically changed national security and intelligence services.
Dame Rimington explained how she was first recruited to the small MI5 office in India as a part time clerk typist, before her career took her back to London to work as a junior assistant officer.
In those days, she added, the main threat was from the Soviet Union and stopping their spies from gaining information that would help them in the Cold War, along with finding out who they were, catching them out and trying to get them out of the country.
“Counter-espionage is a study that requires a lot of detailed work,” said Rimington, and one which is a “slow process” where “speed is not nearly as important as certainty.”
However, along came the 1970s and 1980s, and the arrival of terrorism, mainly in the form of the IRA but also in the Middle-East. This threat changed the landscape of security and intelligence strategies, and began a “great international collaboration of counter-terrorism, which has since developed enormously” to fight against a different type of enemy: one often focused on killing innocent people.
When fighting terrorism, Dame Rimington said, unlike counter-espionage, speed is required, and it requires a great deal of nerve “because you rarely have total information and very often have to act on partial information.
“It needs much brighter, much more sharp, daring and proactive people” who are willing to take calculated risks quickly.
This, along with greater diversity, forward-thinking approaches and a move away from a culture of blame, is needed now more than ever, concluded Dame Rimington, who argued that security threats to the world are worse, more complex and more difficult now than ever before.