Secrets and spies: Behind the doors of the GCHQ
nationalgeographic.co.uk
nationalgeographic.co.uk
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
> 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.
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...
Isn't this an obviously biased sample? People who work at GCHQ can't talk about it, even if they enjoy it.
And for the few who are allowed to discuss it and enjoy working there they won't talk about it because, as you say, look at the HN discussion.
You just need enough, given unlimited computational budgets.
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.
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
Best of all, I get to work on systems which touch entire populations.
I guess Type-X personalities need not apply.
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.
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 :-)
As a basic first-order op, start with a the graduation photos of the elite British schools, which wouldn't be hard to get from their libraries. Pass that to some basic facial recognition software and within minute you will have all those secret last names.
This measure is probably more about generating mystique that is useful for recruiting than it is about maintaining security.
(people should stop using "KGB" to refer to any Russian intelligence service, it's just fighting a war that ended 30 years ago)
Most of the UK laws do specifically have sections allowing the security services to operate.
/S
Cool detail about the Royal Navy and lead-lined code books though.
They're trying but apparently there's not enough ballet dancers to fill all the roles.
https://twitter.com/MrMichaelSpicer/status/13156404326977167...
(Comedy sketch from Michael Spicer on the subject)
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.
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?
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.
Lots of advertising for all three arms of the military at the moment too.
I just assume they are mostly contractors these days
https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/23/investigatory_powers_...
Edit: having read it, very lightweight as you'd expect. Interesting they are publicising their new in-house historian (https://twitter.com/TrooperAbs) but not the new authorised history that has just been released (https://twitter.com/GCHQ/status/1320292272488009729).
[0] badly put but I hope it's clear
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.
Ultimately many of the analyst tools they use are decades old, and only support Windows.
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.
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.
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.