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The official 100-year history of GCHQ will run from its founding in November 1919. Ferris must deliver a final draft of what will be a major opus in about 12 months so it can be printed and published by October 2019.

Though it is a work of history, Ferris, who was born in Saskatchewan and received his first degree from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, was struck by the relevance to the security issues surrounding modern data.

However, he said there is one huge difference. In today’s world, it isn’t simply one state trying to break the secret information of another but a huge variety of nebulous organizations and cybercriminals that target individuals.

“When I started working in this field, I thought I was dealing with a very archaic, technical means of gathering intelligence that one state could use against another state. The more I started working with it the more I realized I was dealing with a lot of the levers of the modern age.”

“Before 1995, the only people to create code-breaking operations were governments, but nowadays there are somewhere in the low millions of entities, mostly non-governmental, that can break the emails of the overwhelming number of people in Calgary,” he said.

Ferris added it is important for people to learn lessons from the past in order to deal with this relatively new but virulent threat to their most personal information.

“Suddenly, it is no longer state versus state. It is people of one society against another. All of us are being imperilled. Because of the way social media works, we have become very accustomed to signalling, by exposing a great deal of data and information about ourselves. We are giving lots of people access to information about us that they can use against our interests.

“In the space of a generation, without realizing it, we have created a world where communications intelligence is part of everything we do.”

“We need to learn lessons from the past in order to see what will happen in the future. I am convinced we are living in what I call the second age of signals,” he added.