Quotes About GCHQ

The GCHQ staff were sporty, providing most of the players in the Foreign Office football team that won the Civil Service Football Cup in 1952. This could present some peculiar problems. When local reporters covered matches in Cheltenham, they were told they could name the goal-scorers of the visitors, but not of the local team. Reporting these games tested their copywriting skills to the very limits.

He was a rather quirky worker, and he didn't really fit into the day-to-day business of GCHQ. But in terms of coming up with new ideas he was quite exceptional. You had to sort through some rubbish sometimes, but he was very innovative and always willing to challenge the orthodoxy.

We would be in real trouble if everybody in GCHQ was like him, but we can tolerate a higher proportion of such people than most organizations. We put up with a number of people like him. Figure 66 James Ellis. (photo credit 6.4) One of Ellis's greatest qualities was his breadth of knowledge.

I worked for GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters, and is the equivalent of the NSA here in the U.S.

When you have the initial GCHQ induction course for new arrivals, they tell you... not to trust journalists, to be careful to keep everything confidential.

Emphasizing that "people make decisions for emotional reasons not rational ones," the GCHQ contends that online behavior is driven by "mirroring" ("people copy each other while in social interaction with them"), "accommodation," and "mimicry" ("adoption of specific social traits by the communicator from the other participant"). The document then lays out what it calls the "Disruption Operational Playbook.

Most people don't know what goes on in the intelligence services. Certainly I had very little idea what went on in GCHQ. For me it was a job, a chance to use my languages.