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Tony Thorne was one of the officers on the Apollo project, advising the team on the task of integrating large volumes of data. Thorne, a former counterterrorism officer with the Wales Extremism and Counter Terrorism Unit, said he was shocked by what he saw in Scotland. “We are leaving Scotland with an incomplete or inadequate process,” he said.
Key issues highlighted during the trial immediately resurfaced, according to emails and internal memos from 2014 and 2015 reviewed by BuzzFeed News.
Officials described the system as “routinely crashing” and “timeing out after 10 minutes,” with disruptions so severe that it increased “the time it takes to do a simple task.”
Even a basic search causes trouble. One official has explained how he created a search term and got very broad results. They started sifting through documents manually to find out what they needed – but when they did, the system crashed. When he logged back in, he entered the same search term and found that “the search results were not the same.”
Officers using the new system also reported serious problems with the NCIA’s main focus: communication with forces and other agencies. After a suspicious person entered the UK by plane, an officer reported that he received an important intelligence report from officers at the airport in an unreadable format. Another told members of the Apollo team that the NCIA’s inability to share intelligence with other regions still using older systems was a critical risk that “could lead to intelligence failures.”
The quality of the intelligence that makes up these systems is often lacking. In some cases, the NCIA is littered with irrelevant information; on the other, important intelligence does not appear in the NCIA at all. One official complained that the system “automatically ingests” documents unrelated to terrorism. “This problem is something that is always talked about,” the officer wrote, “but now that we live there it seems that nothing is being done about it anymore.”
The NCIA was built on the template of an existing system called the Home Office Large Major Inquiry System, four sources told BuzzFeed News. The problem, he said, was that HOLMES was used to investigate incidents that had already happened, while the NCIA was meant to prevent attacks. Another officer told BuzzFeed News that building the NCIA on top of the HOLMES system led to flaws that made intelligence difficult to find.
Officers expressed these concerns in emails and official reports. One of the main features borrowed from the HOLMES system is a search tool, like Google, which should allow officials to quickly retrieve documents containing specific words, regardless of where the records appear. If possible, this would make it easier to find specific intelligence on potential terrorists from hundreds of thousands of files.
But the search tool is not working. Officers found that if they entered the same search term on multiple occasions, they would get different results each time. The search tool also cannot scan the date of birth, making it more difficult to determine the correct document.
This deficiency dovetailed with another major problem. Initially, it became clear that a lot of duplicate records would end up in the NCIA – because it collects data from different forces that often have the same file on a given individual. One internal report seen by BuzzFeed News acknowledged that this would cause a “knock on” effect that deters analysts. But the higher-ups eventually decided that “no de-duplication will happen” until the whole of England uses the NCIA.
One Manchester-based official who later began using the NCIA told BuzzFeed News that duplication makes finding what you’re looking for like “trying to find a needle in a haystack” — such a struggle that “you can miss important intelligence leads.”
Thorne, a counterterror detective working for the NCIA, grew increasingly concerned. “Unfortunately,” he wrote to colleagues in a February 2014 email, “as we all know that the NCIA has struggled to deliver on what it promised and has not lived up to its goals.”
Rollout of NCIA pressed ahead.
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