I APPROACH a gatehouse beside a tall metal fence bristling with warnings and barbed wire. Few reporters get inside the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and it takes three ID checks and several security gates, plus handing over my phone and tablet, before I find myself in front of the agency’s giant stone emblem. The building is in the shape of a giant doughnut, but I’ve only penetrated the outer glaze.
I have been invited here for the launch of a new biography, , written by his nephew Dermot Turing. Alan Turing was one of the leading second world war codebreakers at the proto-GCHQ Bletchley Park, and the modern day spooks hold him dear in their hearts. But the event, the first of its kind at GCHQ, strikes me as something of a PR stunt for an agency that is now mostly associated with mass surveillance and the continuing revelations from Edward Snowden.
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The drinks reception took place in an atrium kitted out as GCHQ’s private museum. Multiple Enigma machines, the Nazi communications device cracked by Turing, and other crypto curios are on display, though nothing past the 1990s – presumably recent tech is still too secret. I could just about peer through the thick glass to see GCHQ staff in their offices, watching in bemusement at such a public event in their secretive halls.
As I mingled with GCHQ operatives, it became clear that Turing is genuinely beloved here. Staff apparently queued out of the building to get their own exclusive GCHQ edition of the book.
Many people told me that tales of Turing’s escapades during the war inspired them to go into cryptography. Nearly everyone mentions Turing when they apply, says GCHQ historian Tony Comer, one of the few people authorised to speak to me on the record. “He is the emblematic member of staff working at Bletchley Park. Enigma stands for our history in the public mind.”
Their stories were eerily familiar: I, too, grew up reading about Turing, and went on to study maths and cryptography at university. I considered applying for a job at GCHQ, eager to tackle the kind of problems Turing faced, but ultimately decided I wouldn’t be able to handle keeping my friends and family in the dark.
But this conflation of war hero Turing with modern-day GCHQ troubles me. Is it a cover for an agency that has overstepped its bounds to spy en masse, if the Snowden revelations are to be believed? For example, the latest documents suggest that a GCHQ system called Karma Police aims to of every person on the internet.
It’s clear that the constant accusations of mass spying have taken a toll on the staff here, who are at pains to distance themselves from such reports. Naturally, Comer doesn’t recognise this malevolent portrayal of the agency. “Why would anyone who thought like Turing want to work at an organisation like that? We are not like that,” he says.
But surely the released documents must contain some grain of truth. The nature of its work means GCHQ cannot respond to specific allegations, so it falls back on a position of “neither confirm nor deny” – but that seems increasingly untenable.
Turing had a clear-cut mission against the Nazis. Murkier modern threats come from within. If Snowden is to be believed, potential terrorists are found through bulk collection of the public’s data, which may or may not be discarded later. Even members of parliament aren’t immune, according to a , despite a long-held doctrine that MPs’ communications are off-limits to the security services.
The UK government is set to introduce laws that would enable wider spying powers and could outlaw some forms of encryption. It is difficult to accept these laws as a necessity in the fight against terror when we don’t, and can’t, know how they might be used against us.
Security services hoovering up ever more data increases the risk of wrongful arrests, such as in the case of , an innocent man who spent two years under house arrest based on secret evidence. Turing’s legacy to us all is the information revolution enabled by his pioneering work in computer science, but he couldn’t have foreseen how much of our lives would be digitised. Is this really what he would have wanted?
“Turing’s legacy to us all is the information revolution, but is this really what he would have wanted?”
As I leave GCHQ, retracing my steps through security, I no longer believe it is the cartoon villain it is sometimes portrayed as. But while its workings remain wrapped in secrecy, with lax public oversight, I’ll never be able to afford it the respect I have for Turing.
(Image: Adrian Sherratt/Alamy Stock Photo)
This article appeared in print under the headline “Visiting the UK’s digital spooks”
