Government Communications Headquarters
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The listening stations are at Cheltenham itself, GCHQ CSO Morwenstow, GCHQ CSO Ascension Island, with the U.S.A. This fact was kept secret until Government Communications Headquarters 1997. In 1984 GCHQ was the centre of a political row when the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher prohibited its employees from belonging to a Trade Union.
It was held that executive action is not immune from judicial review simply because it uses powers derived from common law rather Government Communications Headquarters than statute (thus the prerogative is reviewable). Its existence was not officially acknowledged until 1983, when the trial of Geoffrey Prime made its existence undeniable. Early in the 1970s the asymmetric key algorithm was invented by staff member Clifford Cocks, a mathematics graduate.
The House of Lords had to Government Communications Headquarters decide whether this was reviewable by judicial review. In 1940, GCCS was working on the diplomatic codes and ciphers of 26 countries, tackling over 150 diplomatic cryptosystems. An outstation in the Far East, the Far East Combined Bureau was set up in Hong Kong in 1935, and moved to Singapore in Government Communications Headquarters 1939.
Staff included Alastair Denniston, Oliver Strachey, Dilly Knox, John Tiltman, Edward Travis, Ernst Fetterlein, Josh Cooper and Hugh Foss. During the Second World War, GCCS was based largely at Bletchley Park, reading, most famously, the German Enigma machine ciphers, but also a large number of other systems. For Government Communications Headquarters this a number of stations have been established in the UK and overseas which are run by the Composite Signals Organisation for GCHQ.
Subsequently with the Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsular, the Army and RAF codebreakers went to the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi, India. is the base for all of GCHQ s Cheltenham operations. The public spotlight fell on GCHQ in late 2003 and early 2004 following the sacking of Katharine Gun after she leaked a confidential email from agents at the American National Security Agency to GCHQ agents about the wire-tapping of UN delegates in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war. GCHQ gains its intelligence by monitoring a wide variety of communications and other electronic signals.
Based in Cheltenham, it operates under the guidance of the Joint Intelligence Committee. CESG (originally Communications-Electronics Security Group) is the branch of GCHQ which works to secure the communications and information systems of the government and critical parts of UK national infrastructure. GCHQ was originally established after World War I as the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS or GC&CS), by which name it was known until 1946. GCHQ is the responsibility of the UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, but it is not a part of the Foreign Office, and its Director ranks as a Permanent Secretary. According to James Bamford, circa 1983 GCHQ consisted of a number of divisions identified by letters organised into six directorates: During World War I, Britain s Army and Navy had separate signals intelligence agencies, MI1b and NID25 (also known as Room 40) respectively. Before World War II, GCCS was a relatively small department. This order was issued without consultation.
CESG does not manufacture security equipment, but works with industry to ensure the availability of suitable products and services, while GCHQ itself can fund research into such areas, for example to the Centre for Quantum Computing at Oxford University and the Heilbronn Institute at Bristol University. On the 23rd October 2009 Queen Elizabeth II visited GCHQ. GCHQ operates in partnership with equivalent agencies worldwide in a number of bi-lateral and multi-lateral relationships. This task is given to the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) of GCHQ.
Controversially, they also held that although the failure to consult was unfair, this was overridden by concerns of national security. The following is a list of the heads of the operational heads of GCHQ and GC&CS: MI1 · MI2 · MI3 · MI4 · MI7 · MI8 · MI9 · MI10 · MI11 · MI12 · MI14 · MI15 · MI16 · MI17 · MI19 · Coordinates: 51°53′58″N 2°07′28″W / 51.8995°N 2.1245°W / 51.8995; -2.1245 . The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is a British intelligence agency responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance to the UK government and armed forces.
By 1922, the main focus of GCCS was on diplomatic traffic, with no service traffic ever worth circulating Messages decrypted by GCCS were distributed in blue jacketed files that became known as BJs . In the 1920s, GCCS was successfully reading Soviet Union diplomatic ciphers. Ayios Nikolaos Station on Cyprus is run by the British Armed Forces for GCHQ. In addition to SIGINT, GCHQ provides assistance to Government Departments on their own communications security.
However, in May 1927, during a row over clandestine Soviet support for the General Strike and the distribution of subversive propaganda, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made details from the decrypts public, prompting the Soviet to change their systems to more secure schemes, including the one-time pad. The ban was eventually lifted by the incoming Labour government in 1997, with the Government Communications Group of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) Union being formed to represent interested employees at all grades. Since 1994, GCHQ activities have been subject to scrutiny by Parliament s Intelligence and Security Committee.
CESG is the UK national technical authority for information assurance, including cryptography. Post-Cold War, the aims of GCHQ were set out by the Intelligence Services Act 1994. At the end of 2003, GCHQ moved to a new circular HQ (popularly known as the Doughnut ): at the time, it was the second-largest public-sector building project in Europe, with an estimated cost of £337 million.
The principal of these is with the United States (National Security Agency), Canada (Communications Security Establishment), Australia (Defence Signals Directorate) and New Zealand (Government Communications Security Bureau), through the mechanism of the UK-USA Security Agreement, a broad intelligence sharing agreement encompassing a range of intelligence collection methods. Relationships are alleged to include shared collection methods, such as the system described in the popular media as ECHELON, as well as analysed product. A controversial GCHQ case determined the scope of judicial review of prerogative powers (the Crown s residual powers under common law). It was claimed that joining such a union would be in conflict with national security.
at Menwith Hill, and the Columbia Annex (CANX). In this case, a prerogative Order in Council had been used by the prime minister (who is the Minister for the Civil Service) to ban trade union activities by civil servants working at GCHQ.
