A century on, security services face their ‘biggest challenges yet’
RAPID changes in technology are posing “unique challenges” to the security services, which will face “enormous complexity” in the future, the boss of GCHQ has said.
Speaking 100 years since Government Communications Headquarters was formed, Jeremy Fleming, the director, described society as being in a “period of accelerated change” with technological advances leaving the spy agency needing to alter how it works.
GCHQ, which rarely speaks publicly about its work but has tried to become less secretive in recent years, is marking its centenary with a series of events including an exhibition at the Science Museum in London.
Mr Fleming said: “We’re living through a period of accelerated change in terms of technology: that comes with huge advantages and unique challenges for society. It means the way we work is changing.
“But throughout our history we have always tackled developments in communications to stay one step ahead.”
Mr Fleming described the Five Eyes intelligence group – the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada – which will mark its 75th anniversary in 2021, as an “extraordinary partnership that plays a pivotal part in global security and stability”.
GCHQ was set up on Nov 1 1919 as a peacetime “cryptanalytic” unit made up from staff from the Admiralty’s Room 40 and the War Office’s MI1(B).
During the Second World War, personnel moved to Bletchley Park, where they decrypted German messages, most famously by breaking the Enigma code. The agency’s best-known former member of staff is Alan Turing, the wartime codebreaker and pioneer of computer science. GCHQ regards his technical innovations as “ahead of their time” and they still inform its work.
In the early Fifties, the service moved its headquarters from the London suburbs of Eastcote to Cheltenham but it kept a base in the capital.
In April the location was revealed. Unknown to the public, intelligence officers had worked to protect national security from the drab-looking building on Palmer Street, opposite St James’s Park Tube station in Westminster, since 1953. It also has bases in
Bude in Cornwall, Scarborough, Lincolnshire and Harrogate, with another office in Manchester due to open.
Working alongside MI5 and MI6, over the years GCHQ has looked to tackle serious cyber, terrorist, criminal and state threats and attacks, including investigating the Novichok poisoning in March last year.
It helped foil 23 attacks against the nation in the last four years and prevented about £1.5 billion of tax evasion between 2018-2019.
Mr Fleming said: “For GCHQ, it has been a century of shortening wars, saving lives and giving the UK a technical edge. I can’t predict what GCHQ will look like 100 years from now. Who we are has been shaped by the changing threats and technology around us.
“In the future we will continue to face enormous complexity but also enormous opportunity.”