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Secrets and spies: Behind the doors of the GCHQ
- uhhyeahdude 6y agoWhat an obvious piece of propaganda/recruitment ad. Is GCHQ having such difficulty finding staff? Cool detail about the Royal Navy and lead-lined code books though.
- Glanford 6y ago>Is GCHQ having such difficulty finding staff? They're trying but apparently there's not enough ballet dancers to fill all the roles.
- delibes 6y agoIn case non-UK people don't get it ... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54553828 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54553828
- vanilla-almond 6y agoAlso related for anyone who read the article above: https://twitter.com/MrMichaelSpicer/status/1315640432697716736 https://twitter.com/MrMichaelSpicer/status/13156404326977167... (Comedy sketch from Michael Spicer on the subject)
- qz2 6y agoThat one solicited a decent size guffaw. What a ridiculous campaign it was.
- nix23 6y agoRussia has quite allot...oh
- cs02rm0 6y agoIs GCHQ having such difficulty finding staff? A large government department requiring niche technical skills on public sector pay and bureaucracy levels in a rural part of the country? There are probably some difficulties.
- rmrfstar 6y agoRecruitment isn't a problem if there is a worthwhile mission. Things like the Berlin Airlift and Marshall Plan motivate people. The idea that GCHQ is doing anything other than preserving Britain's role as junior partner in an increasingly immoral American empire is kind of laughable. At this point, what do America and Britain stand for?
- noir_lord 6y agoPretty much this, they pay crap. That and a lot of the people with the genuine skills they need are actually on the other side of the spectrum from them on things like liberty, free speech and privacy. Fuck 'em.
- qz2 6y agoYes they are having difficulty. No one wants to be paid that terribly to work for a place that owns a big chunk of your life, leaves you somewhat less employable afterwards and does nothing even slightly sexy.
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- pjc50 6y agoI know a couple of ex staff who left after a short while, dissatisfied. Obviously no details but it's clear that it combines the low pay and inflexibility of civil service work with a whole extra hassle of working securely. Lots of advertising for all three arms of the military at the moment too.
- merrvk 6y agoFull-time staff they will struggle with as the pay is so crap for the skills they need. I just assume they are mostly contractors these days
- fanf2 6y ago“For security reasons, all but a handful of employees here – such as the director – are known only by their first names.” It was amusing going to tech meetings in London, when GCHQ/NCSC staff sometimes attend. The spooks are blatantly obvious with their first-name-only badges :-)
- qz2 6y agoI think I'd probably spend most of the meeting trying to find out their real names.
- noir_lord 6y agoI'd like to ask them how they square the circle morally by supporting an agency that under the most optimistic interpretation breaks the law constantly.
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- qz2 6y agoThat kind of thinking is compartmentalised into oblivion.
- pjc50 6y agoThis has been solved: the home secretary can now authorise the security services to commit crimes completely legally. /S
- DanBC 6y agoThey claim that they don't break the law. Most of the UK laws do specifically have sections allowing the security services to operate.
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoAt this point in time I’d almost go as far as saying those working in something as ethically disagreeable as cigarette production would be justified in guffawing at the hypocrisy should some tech worker bring up the morality of their work with them.
- randompwd 6y agoPure propaganda. Shame on the self described journalist for partaking in this propaganda.
- vlod 6y agoOne of the interesting thing that struck me, is that in the photos of computer screens, it appears they are using Windows. wtf? Now I'm nervous enough about these Windows zero day exploits to not use windows (using Ubuntu now). I just expected them to be even more paranoid than me.
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- krona 6y agoI severely doubt the computer of an analyst actually has anything like an internet connection. Anything 'exposed' to the outside world is basically assumed to be infected, including hardware. Ultimately many of the analyst tools they use are decades old, and only support Windows.
- vlod 6y agoIt makes sense that an analyst would just shift through internal tools not connected, that process intelligence data. However, they must have s/w engineers. I'm curious how they do their jobs w/o stack-overflow, google and obviously HN. :) Yes, it's possible to do dev w/o an internet connection, but programming nowadays is a pita, especially as a full-stacker. i.e. I just had to deal with a sticky css footer problem and I would have topped myself if I didn't have the internet.
- LodeOfCode 6y agoMaybe they have a separate computer for that? As long as it doesn't have anything secret on it, it shouldn't matter much if it's infected. Though they'd still have to be careful that what they search doesn't give anything away, and that an adversary might be injecting results, so maybe not.
- content_sesh 6y agoYou'd be surprised how far you can get with printed reference material. And especially if you're using mostly "boring"/"mature" technology. There probably are machines connected to the public internet, but if you need to lock your workstation, walk over to the designated unclassified machine, log in to that, do your search, write down or print the answer, log out of that machine, walk back to your workstation and then unlock it - every time you want to look up a CSS thing - you'd probably just ask your boss to buy you a dang book.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoThere was a program on the radio about either GCHQ or MI5 a while back, interviewing some who worked there, all young people by their voices. They talked about it as a job, even the interviewer noted they didn't discuss dealing/mitigating bad stuff like actual bad actors and enemies[0], they liked it as a job, reasonably enthusiastic I guess. What was most obvious to me was they sounded not very smart; they had little insight into a larger role, no deeper questioning of what they were really doing, mainly a nice secure job and that was fine with them. They came over as medium-dull bureaucrats at the start of their career. [0] badly put but I hope it's clear
- mellosouls 6y agoThis, I think: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06pnd71 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06pnd71
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoThanks for the link, but it's not that one. That's a joint interview, in the program I heard they were spoken to individually.
- klelatti 6y agoRegister article on how GCHQ has been breaking the law: https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/23/investigatory_powers_tribunal_gchq_15_years_illegal_surveillance_no_penalty https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/23/investigatory_powers_...
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- wasteofelectron 6y agoNice that the article links to the original Time Out "Eavesdroppers" article, but only mentions an "American journalist" as author, ignoring Duncan Campbell. Both were given a hard time by the authorities, which Campbell wrote about at The Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-british-eavesdroppers/ https://theintercept.com/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-british-e... Edit: having read it, very lightweight as you'd expect. Interesting they are publicising their new in-house historian (https://twitter.com/TrooperAbs https://twitter.com/TrooperAbs) but not the new authorised history that has just been released (https://twitter.com/GCHQ/status/1320292272488009729 https://twitter.com/GCHQ/status/1320292272488009729).
- tpmx 6y agoSpeaking of GCHQ - this is an excellent movie starring Keira Knightley and Matt Smith that got way too little exposure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Secrets_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Secrets_(film) (Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 89%) > Official Secrets is a 2019 British-American docudrama film based on the life of (GCHQ) whistleblower Katharine Gun who leaked a memo exposing an illegal spying operation by American and British intelligence services to gauge sentiment of and potentially blackmail United Nations diplomats tasked to vote on a resolution regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Gun > Gun's regular job at GCHQ in Cheltenham was to translate Mandarin Chinese into English. While at work at GCHQ on 31 January 2003, Gun read an email from Frank Koza, the chief of staff at the "regional targets" division of the American signals intelligence agency, the National Security Agency. > Koza's email requested aid in a secret operation to bug the United Nations offices of six nations: Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan. These were the six "swing nations" on the UN Security Council that could determine whether the UN approved the invasion of Iraq. The plan might have contravened Articles 22 and 27 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which regulates global diplomacy.
- jdsalaro 6y agoThis is a wonderful movie and one anyone interested in the stories and fate of Assange, Manning and Snowden will appreciate.
- azalemeth 6y agoI really think this article, like many others, is part of a post-Snowden propaganda push. They know they've lost the hearts and minds of nerds -- that's why we now encrypt everything. Where once GCHQ et al were desirable places to work, now I am very much sure that the vibe among the people they want to attract is far from positive. Just look at the HN discussion, for example. One of my friends is an academic computer scientist, working on steganography, specifically steganalysis -- trying to do the inverse problems like "given 1e12 cat pictures, find the one with hidden information". GCHQ often like to talk to him about his work. He has spoken of it being filled with mathematicians too socially inept to have an academic career...
- redis_mlc 6y ago> Where once GCHQ et al were desirable places to work From a US perspective, Britain has low salaries in the private sector, but the civil service is even worse. You would have to squint carefully at the benefits before joining.
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoI’m not sure what spurred you into action to offer up... well this... but do please keep in mind that many of us outside the USA don’t put money ahead of literally everything else in life as most Americans seem to.
- hevelvarik 6y agoAnything more you care to say about what most Americans seem to ... You have to have quite the vantage point to have insight like that. It’s more than likely that you all on the other side of the Atlantic aren’t our betters
- inquirerofsorts 6y agoIt's exactly the same in the US public service. The TLA's have been complaining about it for years and they are essentially hamstrung with defined public service salaries. It's a shitty situation for natsec operators and institutionally hard to change. All of which has essentially led to the proliferation of greymarkets for exploits like Zerodium et al. The situation is likely far worse for the States than the UK as the salary differential is greater and the agencies can only hire citizens. Do note that the US government is now the biggest buyer of malware on the planet, not really that surprising when you look at the circumstances.
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