Business Is Booming for the U.K.’s Spy Tech Industry

Driving into Cheltenham from the west, it is hard to miss the offices of Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s surveillance agency. The large, doughnut-shaped building sits behind high-perimeter fencing with barbed wire and many levels of security. The facility – used to eavesdrop on global emails and phone calls – is located on the edge of the sleepy Gloucestershire town, which feels like an incongruous location for one of the world’s most aggressive spy agencies.

Cheltenham has a population of just 117,000 people, and GCHQ’s presence has turned the area into one of Europe’s central hubs for companies working in the fields of cybersecurity and surveillance. GCHQ says it employs almost 6,000 people in Cheltenham and at some smaller bases around the U.K., although the agency has in recent years secretly expanded its workforce, reportedly employing thousands more staff.

People in the area are now talking of a cyber “corridor” that stretches for 50 miles from Malvern, just north of Cheltenham, all the way to Bristol, where the Ministry of Defence has its equipment and support headquarters at Abbey Wood. Many quaint English towns, known for their farming and country pubs, have seen an influx of companies dealing in cybersecurity and electronic spying. Even office space on former farms is being used for this burgeoning industry.

Chris Dunning-Walton, the founder of a nonprofit called Cyber Cheltenham, or Cynam, organizes quarterly events in the town attended by politicians and entrepreneurs. “Historically, there has been a need for the companies that are working here to be very off the radar with their relationships with GCHQ and to some extent, that does exist,” says Dunning-Walton. But since Edward Snowden leaked information in 2013 about GCHQ’s sweeping surveillance activities, the agency has been forced to come out of the shadows and embrace greater transparency. One consequence of this, according to Dunning-Walton, is that GCHQ is now more open to partnering with private companies, which has helped fuel the cyber industry around the Cheltenham area.

Northrop Grumman, the world’s fifth-largest arms manufacturer, has located its European cyber and intelligence operations in Cheltenham, where it has two offices in the center of the town. In the nearby city of Gloucester, a 20-minute drive west of Cheltenham, Raytheon, the world’s third-largest arms company, in 2015 opened a Cyber Innovation Centre that it says is focused on “big data, analytics and network defense.” BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, the cyber arm of the world’s fourth-largest arms company, also has offices in Gloucester, where it says it “delivers information intelligence solutions to government and commercial customers.”

Post too long big story:

https:// theintercept.com/2018/05/11/gbhq-surveillance-spying-technology/

NSA’s Quiet Presence at a Base in England’s Countryside Revealed in Snowden Documents

Civil war was raging in Libya, and Col. Moammar Gadhafi was in hiding. Two thousand miles away, on the outskirts of a small village in the English countryside, British and American spies were monitoring the chaos, listening in on the Gadhafi regime’s phone calls.

The spies were part of a group known as Joint Service Signal Unit Digby, operating from within a nearly 100-year-old military base near the village of Ashby de la Launde in Lincolnshire, a county in England’s east midlands. About a three-hour drive north of London, it is a scantly populated area encompassing flat fields that stretch across the landscape. The British government says publicly that the Digby facility conducts “research into new communications systems.” A more truthful account is that it is an important part of the sprawling covert surveillance network maintained by British and American spy agencies, GCHQ and the National Security Agency.

Digby has attracted little media scrutiny in the United Kingdom, perhaps because it is smaller in size and not as visually striking as other surveillance bases in the country. It consists of a nondescript, single-story building and a series of attached offices, all in the southwest corner of a larger military compound. There is an adjacent field equipped with about two dozen antennas, according to maps of the area, but these cannot be seen from a distance. Unlike better-known NSA and GCHQ bases in England, such as the facilities in Bude, Cornwall, and Menwith Hill, Yorkshire, there are no massive, golf ball-like domes visible from miles away; instead, Digby blends in with the landscape.

The NSA’s presence at Digby has never been reported before. And secret documents published Wednesday by The Intercept show that the agency has prized its low profile at the obscure site. The base “does not attract the kind of press attention lavished on RAF Menwith Hill to the north — and long may that continue,” one NSA employee wrote in a March 2005 article for SIDtoday, an internal NSA newsletter. “The American presence here is a quiet one,” the employee added, “but [it] has a profound impact as soldiers, sailors and airmen work together with their British counterparts to produce critical intelligence on an amazing variety of targets.”

More here big story:

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/13/digby-uk-nsa-gchq-surveillance/

>>1512845

Here is Ed O’Callahan

https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_O%27Callaghan

http://

www.businessinsider.com/preet-bharara-sheriff-of-wall-street-replacement-2017-3/

>>1512845

>Ed O’Callahan Corrected Sorry for confusion,

https:// www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/nunes-gowdy-meet-with-doj-officials-amid-russia-probe-standoff/ar-AAx55Bc

>>1513131

This also goes with it Baker

>>1512573 Business Is Booming for the U.K.’s Spy Tech Industry