GCHQ staff 'would sooner walk' than do anything 'resembling mass surveillance’

This was the week when GCHQ boss Sir Iain Lobban managed to exit stage left from the spook play without ever mentioning the Edward-Snowden-shaped-elephant in the room. The now-former director of British spies did not speak directly about the the rogue NSA sysadmin's leak of GCHQ’s TEMPORA programme, but he did mention that …

[JaitcH]

"People who work at GCHQ would sooner walk ... than be involved in ... ‘mass surveillance’" Sure!

So please explain who/why copied all those Yahoo pictures?

And does he/she/they still work for GCHQ?

BTW: Those pictures that regaled many papers yesterday showing 'covered' GCHQ workers were actually quite revealing.

One picture showed roof-mounted aerials/antennae very clearly from which you could deduce approximate frequency and direction, whilst another picture clearly related the same aerials/antennae to major features of the building.

Guess the subservient UK press is awaiting a DN notice so the news can be censored, again.

[Roadcrew]

GCHQ peeps...

When visiting GCHQ and varied offshoots in a technical capacity most of the people we met were (on the face of it) pretty decent. Quite a few very relaxed individuals, doing an important job.

Very nearly ended up working at one of the varied offshoots, and in hindsight that could have been more fun than what I ended up doing.

The impression I had was yes, these were people who (on the whole) would rather walk than be involved with Orwellian mass surveillance.

But I have also seen what happens anywhere when jobs are on the line and Mighty Masters of Management start putting on the pressure to do evil stuff - good people can end up part of a moderately machiavellian machine.

To all the good people at GCHQ - hello!

It's your masters' motives we distrust....

And it's about time there was someone effective in government with a proper education and some decent experience of the world we live in. Malevolent muppets, most of them.

<sigh>

[Anonymous Coward]

""People who work at GCHQ would sooner walk ... than be involved in ... ‘mass surveillance’""

As usual this is the intelligence agencies providing deliberately misleading quotes. What he actually means is that they like to walk around campus as a break from their usual jobs of mass surveillance....

[Swarthy]

"The people who work at GCHQ would sooner walk out the door than be involved in anything remotely resembling ‘mass surveillance’." ..After 5PM. They are civil servants you know. You can't ask them to work late; that just wouldn't be proper.

[Vociferous]

Hahahahahaha

Yeah I realize GCHQ have to damage-control with sh!t like this to preserve the efficiency of surveillance, but come on.

It is known you're doing mass surveillance, you're so deep in the cookie jar we can barely see your ankles, so denying it just invites ridicule.

[Spanners]

Google Maps

She's partly right. Some of the pictures are taken from aircraft.

I think it will be funnier when she "Discovers" StreetView!

[Alan Brown]

Re: Google Maps

"I think it will be funnier when she "Discovers" StreetView!"

Streetview can count the roses in her front garden, not her back garden.

I think it's funnier that councils have been using G maps photos to find illegal house extensions and pools in various areas.

[Steve Knox]

Absolutely True.

The people who work at GCHQ would sooner walk out the door than be involved in anything remotely resembling ‘mass surveillance’.

We access the internet at scale so as to dissect it with surgical precision.

Ah, I see. It's all a matter of emphasis. It's clear that his point is that if the GCHQ were limited to doing things which only remotely resemble mass surveillance, they would quit.

Since the resemblance between their activities and mass surveillance is in no way remote, they're fine with it.

Makes perfect sense now.

[Steven Raith]

Re: Absolutely True.

"The people who work at GCHQ would sooner walk out the door than be involved in anything remotely resembling ‘mass surveillance’.

We access the internet at scale so as to dissect it with surgical precision."

More like throwing machetes into a crowd, IMHO....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Absolutely True.

Backwards. It's more like hunting pheasant with an elephant gun. Which isn't right either as it would imply that they're terrific shots or they never hit anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

So where the f*** is this coming from?

I regularly see this sort of thing in my firewall logs:

Time If Rule Source Destination Proto

Oct 25 13:53:28 WAN1 Block private networks from WAN1 block 192.168/16 (@67)   192.168.54.1   w.x.y.z ICMP

ie a ping from 192.168.54.1 to my WAN address (w.x.y.z) at home. I've asked my ISP and they say they do not pass RFC1918 addresses (those in 10.x.x.x, 172.16-31.x.x, 192.168.x.x etc etc). 192.168.51 is nothing to do with me nor are the other random attempts I see.

Wonder where the probes come from?

Only tin foil hat wearers need apply.

Cheers

Jon

[Barrie Shepherd]

Re: So where the f*** is this coming from?

Could they be from those who trawl the internet looking for VoIP system to hack into? I see similar IPs attempting to access my VoIP box.

[Jamie Jones]

Re: So where the f*** is this coming from?

1) Your ISP is wrong (or maybe they filter from the *internet* and these are being produced by another customer?)

2) Who cares anyway? It's not as if they'll get a response.

3) Occams razor etc.

[Vociferous]

Re: So where the f*** is this coming from?

Disclaimer: not a network tech, so someone is likely to rip me a new one here, but AFAIK that's your computer trying to talk to your NIC over DHCP. 192.168.x.x = local (behind your router), port 67 = DHCP. Perhaps you've blocked something with your firewall that you shouldn't have.

[Alan Brown]

Re: So where the f*** is this coming from?

" I've asked my ISP and they say they do not pass RFC1918 addresses "

From outside their network.

These probes are coming from other customers at the same ISP. They generally don't filter at this level on the basis that it would kill the routers.

[Grubby]

Playing the fool

I suspect that she's playing the fool rather than an actual fool. if you act stupid then no-one could ever assume you're actually watching your people's every move. It's a bit like how George Bush remained in power for so long and manage to invade all those countries, the reasons he's giving must be true as he's too stupid to make up a story right?

Having said that I work with a very wide range of people doing my consulting job and the higher up the chain you go the lower the IQ, so she could actually be as stupid as she appears.

[teebie]

How targetted are the snapchat ads?

"Based on your recent activity, we think you would be interested hearing about divorce lawyers, and non-paisley pajamas"

[Nelbert Noggins]

He really said paedophiles in his list of antagonists to the blessing?

Maybe it's just me, but there are many ways to describe the realities of how the internet is used and providing vague descriptions of who is on the GCHQ radar, but needing to specifically mention paedophiles just seems to show he's toeing the party line.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Not walking

I suspect a lot of advances in internet surveillance have been techies going "Wouldn't be cool if we could do this" instead of considering the long term implications of performing the action.

[John Savard]

Sir Lobbain is right

After all, the people who joined GCHQ did so to defend the liberties of the British people, to stop madmen like Hitler from enslaving Blighty. So I'm sure they would not willingly participate in anything Orwellian.

What is unfortunate, of course, is that the threat posed by terrorists does also mean that they could end up like the famous boiled frog that didn't jump out of the pot because the heat was turned up so gradually. Good intentions aren't always a guarantee of good actions.