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General Category => Blog => Topic started by: kat on October 22, 2014, 05:49:09 PM

Title: GCHQ (UK NSA) Sir Iain Lobban's farewell speech
Post by: kat on October 22, 2014, 05:49:09 PM
Outgoing GCHQ (the British NSA) head Sir Iain Lobban's farewell speech (https://www.gchq.gov.uk/speech/sir-iain-lobbans-valedictory-speech-delivered).

It's a long but relatively interesting read because he's essentially pleading the case for the collection of data from the Internet and conflating that with the way Intelligence was gathered during WWII to successfully break codes and save lives. Dragnet data collection didn't do that, targeted acquisition did.
Quote
In the middle of the summer, when I resolved to give this talk, the following events were taking place around the world:
- A commercial airliner flying at over thirty thousand feet over eastern Ukraine was shot down with a sophisticated surface-to-air missile system, with the loss of 298 lives, 80 of them children
- Fierce fighting on the ground continued after Russia’s annexation of Crimea
- ISIL advances in Syria and Iraq continued, treating local populations with devastating savagery, and the video of the beheading of the first western hostage spread across the internet
- The American, Canadian and British embassies suspended operations in Tripoli due to armed clashes between Libyan militias in the country
- The National Crime Agency carried out further arrests of predators involved in child exploitation
- Thirty-five adults and children, one of whom died, were discovered in a lorry, illegally trafficked from Afghanistan
- £100 million pounds-worth of cocaine was seized off the coast of Ireland
- Nearly 200 cyber incidents against the UK’s networks of national significance were detected and responded to.