Last month, Robert Hannigan, the director of GCHQ, a British intelligence agency, wrote an opinion piece in the Financial Times castigating tech companies for being “in denial” about abuses of their platforms by criminals and terrorists and calling on them to develop better arrangements for facilitating lawful government investigations. While there is certainly much room for improved cooperation between government and the private sector, the first step for reform should be for intelligence agencies like GCHQ to take a hard look in the mirror.
