The Privacy Mission

CHAPTER 3How Did We Get Here?

To understand how we reached the point we are at today, we need to understand the origins of the technology we use daily and take for granted. The very first iteration of the internet was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which was first developed in the 1960s as an American defence system that then spread into academia. This system allowed different universities and research groups to connect and share their work more easily.

It was not until 1989 that Tim Berners‐Lee developed the World Wide Web, which was designed to allow people all over the world to share information much more easily. This was when the internet started to take root.

I can even remember the first time some very geeky friends of mine in Cambridge showed me the internet. Back then it was a wondrous thing that allowed you to communicate with people via computers and where you would find pages that you could navigate with the help of a mouse. If you are a digital native reading this now, you will probably think this sounds incredibly odd, but you have to understand that this was all completely new to us.

When I joined MI5 in the 1990s, it was fully paper‐based. It was not until 1995 that the service adopted Microsoft as its communication platform, and during the entire period that David and I were on the run we only had one computer between us, which he used exclusively. This meant I fell out of touch with the technology and how it had evolved.

In 2005, I ...