The director of GCHQ, Iain Lobban, has delivered a speech praising the legacy of Alan Turing in today’s battle against cyber criminals.
Speaking at the University of Leeds, Mr Lobban said that if Turing was working today, he would be working to tackle cyber crime.
“Then [during World War II], the challenge was to secure allied codes and ciphers to prevent the enemy doing to us what we were doing to them; today, securing cyberspace so that the UK and its allies can use it safely to develop e-government and trade and requires the collaboration of experts as diverse both personally and intellectually as any we saw at Bletchley Park.
“Bletchley Park was really about exploiting the adversary’s information risk, while minimising our own. Today the Internet provides the virtual global landscape for an analogous struggle.”
Mr Lobban also said that, now as then, we need to work in partnership with other countries in order to defuse the threat of cybercrime.
“Meeting the cyber challenge of today and tomorrow in the face of a ubiquitous and indispensable global communications network will mean collaboration more broadly than just within Government. Industry has a key role to play as we transform how we work to build cyber capacity, in order to enjoy the huge benefits and economic advantages of the internet, at the same time as defending ourselves against the threats.”
Founder of the information age
Turing’s contribution to war-time code-breaking was part of “the irrevocable change that turned the Code and Cypher School from being the mainly cryptanalytic bureau it was between the wars to becoming the highly technological intelligence organisation that GCHQ is today.”
Mr Lobban went onto describe Turing’s legacy asking “does anything Turing did in the 19040s still matter?”
He said that many of Turing’s methods – from the ban, a unit of measurement devised by Turing, to the use of Bayesian statistics to score hypotheses also devised by his team – are still in use today.
However he also said that Turing was a founder of the information age.
“[He was] one of the people whose concepts are at the heart of a technological revolution which is as far reaching as the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the post-war era, we continued to enjoy the benefits of the abstract Turing machine model, from our 1980s washing machines to the mini computers we carry in our pockets today. Turing was part of a revolution which has led to a transformation of every aspect of our lives.”
An organisation at the cutting edge
Mr Lobban also described how the diversity of the Bletchley Park codebreakers has survived to the modern-day GCHQ. He said that “[The agency cannot] deny itself talent just because the person with the talent doesn’t conform to a social stereotype is to starve itself of what it needs to thrive.”
He described the recruitment of Geoffrey Tandy to Bletchley Park during the war:
“His posting officer had understood him to be an expert in cryptograms, a word still used in the Admiralty at that time to mean messages signalled in code. In fact he was an expert in cryptogams: non-flowering plants like ferns, mosses and seaweeds. While this knowledge might not have appeared to be of much use, Tandy became expert in German naval Enigma and because of his work on seaweed was able to provide unique advice on the preservation of cryptologic documents rescued from the sea.
“Part of my job is to continue to foster that atmosphere: to attract the very best people and harness their talents, and not allow preconceptions and stereotypes to stifle innovation and agility. I want to harness the best talent there is not just so that they can be inventive, but so that they can apply themselves to the big issues of intelligence and security which challenge an organisation which simply has to remain at the cutting edge in order to survive and thrive.”