Call goes out to Q to stop spies snooping on remote civil servants
THE UK’S intelligence community is funding research to stop enemy agents eavesdropping on civil servants working from home.
In a tacit admission that home-working could pose a threat to national security, specialists are being offered grants of up to £200,000 to develop devices that stop calls being bugged.
The offer of funding was made in a document issued by the Government Office for Science in “areas of interest” to the “intelligence, security and defence communities”.
Money is also available for projects including “swarm or team robots for autonomous tunnelling” and “nanotechnology implications for chemical and biological warfare safeguards”.
The funding pays for engineers to spend two years at British universities working full-time to develop solutions to intelligence problems. The programme matches academics with counterparts in the intelligence services.
The research prospectus states: “We would like to understand and protect remote workers; offer best practice for protection of speech and any innovation that we could develop further.”
The document expresses concern for the “acoustic integrity of headsets that are routinely worn both at home and in office environments”. The headsets, the prospectus warned, “have now become commonplace during the pandemic during online meetings”.
The worry for the security services is that “privacy of speech” is compromised by enemy agents listening in on conversations. It suggests that academics look at different construction materials that could prevent conversations being intercepted and overheard both at home and in the office.
The document says likely solutions may include “rapidly deployable structures” to contain sound and thereby stop snooping attempts.
Alternative solutions detailed in the prospectus include blasting sub-aural sound around workers to disrupt longrange listening technology.
Active case officers and specialists working within the intelligence services are understood not to be routinely permitted to work from home, with most operatives continuing to work from offices even at the height of the pandemic.
The intelligence services have prevented most staff from working from home due to security fears. Civil servants, however, who may have access to secret or sensitive information, continue to frequently work from home.
Boris Johnson has demanded civil servants return to the office and said working from home is not satisfactory, insisting staff are “more productive, more energetic, more full of ideas” when surrounded by colleagues.
Jacob Rees-mogg, the Cabinet minister in charge of civil service efficiency, has tried to force mandarins back to work, even leaving notes on empty desks demanding officials return to work. The fear that home-working leaves the Government open to cyber attacks and eavesdropping will strengthen his demands for civil servants to return to the office.