Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5 in the UK, has made the claim that technology has made the work of spies much easier, but that improvements in encryption technology have made it easier for terrorists to work in secret. Giving a keynote speech at the RSA Conference Europe in Vienna, Rimington claimed that advancements in encryption made information gathering a lot more difficult.
"Every development in protecting information makes it more difficult for the intelligence services to access that information," she told delegates.