UK.gov eavesdroppers frustrated by red tape Chiefs at GCHQ, the government's electronic eavesdropping station in Cheltenham, have been told to cut bureaucracy, which it's feared may hamper the agency's ability to cope with an increased demand for intelligence and security testing. "The department has developed a proliferation of strategies, which serves to dilute its …
"The reports authors spoke to junior staff at GCHQ, who said there were too many middle managers slowing decision-making and contributing to overly complex internal procedures."
Replace GCHQ with your choice of NHS, District Council, City Council, in fact, the list of Government 'organisations' to whom it would *not* apply is probably shorter.
Oh - and then they go on to call for 'diversification', rather then employing the best person for the job irrespective of their other attributes.
I think these two things are linked - probably in a manner that is going to involve infinite recursion until the whole house of cards falls down under its own weight.
The organisation has a purpose and is essentially a pure maths, applied signals and translation organisation, why would there be an equal number of men and women there outside the translation section.
No-one would suggest that there would be an equal number of men working in somewhere, say the house of colour, or even in a government department such as the National Health Service?
While not wanting to offend the small number of women clever enough to work in GCHQ (outside translation - I don't get translation, it's outside my capacity, so I don't know whether you can be clever at linguistics or just knowledgable,) they themselves must be aware that they aren't exactly your typical bird from a mental capacity perspective.
I forget who said it, but someone once described these type of people as "Near geniuses who operate outside all the usual rules." Bearing in mind the relative variance from the norm of male and female intellectual capability, we can hardly expect there to be anything other than a predisposition to masculinity in the staff levels.
"It also promised to improve the diversity of its staff, which the Cabinet Office said was "poor", with the proportion of women lagging behind other departments."
It doesn't do the same work as other departments. GCHQ is not a policy department. It's a do-er, not a spender. Any bod can administer, most can manage, but there are almost no women could constuct some cipher, based on elliptic curves, let alone decrypt such ciphertext.
(Actually, to be fair, I don't actually know if anyone can do it.)
mentioned that 80% of gchq staff fully , proudly supported their current tasks, which only leaves 20% of the spooks unhappy - or maybe they are ecstatic!?? and only 34% of gchq staff think their PHB's have no clue
rounding up other gchq news
GCHQ = BETFAIR <http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/cheltenham/cheltenhamnews/Betfair-founder-GCHQ-employee-book/article-1178361-detail/article.html>
and GCHQ facebook = Civil Pages <http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/cheltenham/cheltenhamnews/GCHQ-staff-access-networking-site/article-1162800-detail/article.html>
plus don't mention cooling water in 2007,
may I take this operatunity to say how proud I am of gchq and their cesg colleagues.
Since this is bound to turn into a debate about the rights and wrongs of snooping on the general population, I'm going to point out that I don't have a great problem with GCHQ eavesdropping on me or other ne'er-do-wells. These guys, after all, are supposed to be the professionals.
The issue is when "amateurs" do it, like government departments, the police, local councils and anyone vaguely employed by the state (which RIPA covers rather comprehensively, dontcha think?).
Shouldn't the focus be on getting a few bods in who know what the Internet is / does, or maybe there’s a fear that they may need a few (male or female) lee7 Hax0rz for the job? Once again some clueless intervention by government fuckwits will insure that GCHQ's Internet surveillance will cost a fortune and be totally ineffective for years to come...
Great...
Nice couple of holes you've been digging there :-).
I'm amazed at how *few* women work there, because you're overlooking something. For good SIGINT you don't just need the analytics to clean up the signals, you also need someone to read and interpret them. As far as I know it has even been medically proven that women are better talented in that area, and I would in any case stand well back from any observation that there are fewer women clever enough - they may be clever enough not to want to work there..
I'm all for simplifying structure, as long as they don't facilitate lowering security standards in the process. Some red tape has a reason.
Paris, because she too isn't quite as dumb as she is made out to be.-
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