

Sir Iain Lobban, the outgoing director of Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ, has used his valedictory address to deliver a full-throated defence of its activities in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.



In a speech referencing cryptographer Alan Turing and wartime codebreaking efforts, Lobban praised GCHQ staff as “ordinary people doing an extraordinary job”, and said his agency’s mission was “the protection of liberty, not the erosion of it”.

The usually secretive agency has been under unprecedented scrutiny since June 2013 when the Guardian and other news organisations revealed how it and its US counterpart, the NSA, were scooping up vast quantities of internet and phone traffic.

Documents passed to the Guardian by Snowden, a former NSA contractor, disclosed the existence of the Tempora program, in effect a system to store and recall substantial portions of internet traffic flowing in and out of the UK; the mass Optic Nerve system monitoring the webcam images of people using Yahoo video chat; and Dishfire – a bulk system to store and analyse text messages, including those sent from or received by UK numbers.

Though Lobban did not directly refer to Snowden in his remarks, he addressed many of the concerns raised by privacy advocates in the wake of the disclosures.

Stating that criminals and terrorists could act across the internet – “unfortunately, there’s no badguy.com” – he said GCHQ’s footprint was small.

“Today, of all the communications out there globally – the emails, the texts, the images – only a small percentage are within reach of our sensors,” he told the invited audience at the Cabinet War Rooms.

“Of that, we only intercept a small percentage; of that, we only store a minuscule percentage for a limited period of time; of that, only a small percentage is ever viewed or listened to.”

Lobban did concede that these efforts involved the “incidental collection of data at scale”, but said it was “impossible to operate successfully in any other way”.

He also praised the UK’s “triple lock” system of oversight and regulation, praising it as “the most coherent and well-developed system of which I am aware in relation to such agencies around the world”.

His remarks stand in sharp contrast to some GCHQ’s own training presentations, which noted “we [GCHQ] have a light oversight regime compared with the US”, and also praised the regulators for being “exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret”.

That internal GCHQ legal presentation also noted the investigatory powers tribunal – referred to by Lobban in his remarks – had “so far always found in our favour”.

The closest Lobban came in his speech to directly referring to the publication of the Snowden revelations was to defend the free press, despite the “frustrations” that caused the agency.

“We may get frustrated when our efforts are undone, our enemies advantaged, and our integrity questioned, but we’re not frustrated by the free press itself,” he said. “We do what we do precisely to safeguard the kind of society that has one.”

Lobban’s final day as director of GCHQ is this Friday, 24 October, when he will retire after 31 years in the intelligence services. He will be replaced by Robert Hannigan, who joins from the Foreign Office.

“Sir Iain plans to take a few months’ rest, walk the Cotswold Way and learn Spanish properly,” the briefing accompanying his retirement notes. “He has not disclosed his future plans.”