A “top-secret” cloud service will be built for Australia’s intelligence agencies to share information with one another by the decade’s end as part of a $2bn announcement with US technology giant Amazon.
The deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, said the investment would generate about 2,000 jobs and ensure Australia “maintains” pace with the world’s leading defence force while it increased its interoperability with US agencies.
“It will ensure that we have a far more resilient, capable, lethal, prominent and potent defence force for the future,” Marles said on Thursday.
Three datacentres would be built in the country to house Australia’s most secretive and valuable intelligence, the locations of which will remain secret.
The Australian Signals Directorate’s director general, Rachel Noble, said partnering with a private company meant intelligence agencies would have access to “the best staff the private sector has to offer in terms of technology capabilities, services, and tools”.
This included the newest developments in artificial technology, she said, branding its use to help collect and sift through massive amounts of data as “gamechanging”.
The security of the service would also be complemented by measures to prevent massive data leaks in the post-WikiLeaks era, she said.
“Access to top-secret data is really carefully managed at an individual level and we have very strong controls over what individuals are looking at within that top-secret environment,” she said.
“What they’re accessing, whether that’s related to the role that they have within the organisation and what they print, for example – those same controls will be in place when we launch.”
People involved with the building and operation of the project would be required to meet Australian security clearance requirements.
The technology was needed to address the complex strategic circumstances facing the nation, Marles said.
“Modern defence forces and indeed modern conflict is more reliant upon information technology, upon computing infrastructure, than ever before.
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“In turn, what that means is that increasingly modern conflict is occurring at a top-secret level.
“So this capability in terms of computing infrastructure will ensure that Australia may maintain at pace with the leading defence forces in the world.”
What data would be uploaded to the cloud was still to be determined.
Amazon Web Services would not comment on what similar technologies it contracts to other countries and whether any adversarial countries had access to the same intel or infrastructure.
Control of the top-secret datacentres built in Australia “will remain exclusively the purview of the commonwealth”, Noble said.
– With Australian Associated Press