14 DAY TRIAL // Sir Iain Lobban, the outgoing director of the GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, said that, in his opinion, the people who work at GCHQ would sooner quit than be involved in anything that resembles “mass surveillance.”
We’re not sure exactly what rock Lobban thinks we’ve been living under, but we’ve all seen the NSA documents attesting the agency’s efforts towards this goal and the programs it has devised to help the mass surveillance apparatus the US has created with its international partners.
“The people who work at GCHQ would sooner walk out the door than be involved in anything remotely resembling ‘mass surveillance’… I want to make it absolutely clear that the core of my organization’s mission is the protection of liberty, not the erosion of it,” he said in the full statement, The Next Web reports.
If incredulity colors you while reading this, then you’re in no way alone. It seems that Lobban is in some select company, considering that the leaders of the NSA have a very similar attitude towards the entire situation, although they’re much quicker to throw in the absolute need for national security that will excuse the violation of people’s privacy.
Lobban said that the agency needed to dissect the Internet with surgical precision, however, in order to pull off the balancing act between privacy and tracking down targets. “Presenting our activities as some sort of binary option – security or privacy – is to represent a false choice: we are committed to doing our utmost to deliver security at the same time as protecting privacy to the greatest extent possible,” he added.
The ever-expanding Internet
The GCHQ director mentioned that, in the six years since he’s taken up the job, almost one and half a billion people have joined the Internet, which means that the number of people using the Internet has doubled.
As for the attention the agency has been getting from the media, Lobban claimed that everything the GCHQ does is to help safeguard the kind of society that has a free press, even though the relationship has been quite complicated.
He admitted he didn’t enjoy every minute of the media attention, especially since the GCHQ, just like the NSA, likes to stay away from the public eye and the media. He said, however, that, had he not been at the center of it all, he’d have been unable to sit and watch his fellow professionals have their integrity insulted over and over.
Iain Lobban is to retire from the GCHQ at the end of the week. Robert Hannigan will take over for him. The NSA has also changed leadership following the revelations made thanks to Edward Snowden’s files.