GCHQ Director General Robert Hannigan's Warning and the UK-US Cyber Alliance - Behind the Scenes 2014-2016

GCHQ Director General Robert Hannigan's Warning and the UK-US Cyber Alliance - Behind the Scenes 2014-2016

At the end of 2014, British bureaucrat Robert Hannigan was appointed director of the intelligence agency GCHQ. At the time, Western nations were beginning to realize that the post-Cold War order had begun to crumble with Russia's annexation of Crimea (March 2014). The Putin regime was waging "information warfare" (hybrid warfare), utilizing the Internet and social networking services in addition to traditional military forces, and new threats to the security of Western countries were emerging.

Hannigan was a well-known negotiator for the Northern Ireland peace process and a trusted bureaucrat in the Prime Minister's office. He was chosen as the director of GCHQ because he was entrusted with reforming the traditional closed culture of intelligence to meet the demands of the 21st century cyber-warfare era.

Early in his tenure, he wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times in which he lashed out at Silicon Valley IT giants such as Facebook and Google, saying that they had become "the favorite command networks of terrorists and criminals. He took an unprecedentedly aggressive approach, warning them to cooperate with Western intelligence agencies.

But it was not GAFA that he truly feared, but Putin's cyber disruption, a report brought to him in the spring of 2016 was shocking. Russia's General Directorate of Intelligence (GRU) of the General Staff of the Armed Forces had hacked into the email server of the U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) and was stealing communications containing vast amounts of metadata.

As thousands of cryptographers and cyber personnel at GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham, England, commonly known as "The Donut," analyzed the information gathered, the unclear purpose of Russia's targeting of the DNC was itself bizarre. Instead of clear interests such as military intelligence or policy documents, it became increasingly likely that they were targeting "political fragmentation" to disrupt the election campaign.

At this time, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were facing off in the U.S. presidential election (2016), and there were growing doubts about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. The DNC data that Russia stole was released through WikiLeaks and other sources at opportune times, dealing a blow to the Clinton campaign. In particular, the leak of speech transcripts showing ties to Goldman Sachs contributed to a loss of confidence among progressives within the Democratic Party.

Hannigan sent a warning to NSA Director Michael Rogers, but received only one response. The response was curt: "Other foreign intelligence agencies are aware of this." While the U.S. was slow to act, the British continued to intercept communications from Russia, utilizing their own network intrusion capabilities.

At this time, GCHQ already had access to landing sites monitoring undersea cables around the world and was capable of handling 10 gigabytes of communications at a time from dozens of fiber-optic lines. Backed by this communications infrastructure, the U.K. and the U.S. were secretly operating a global surveillance network in partnership with Facebook and Google as well.

Ironically, the United Kingdom, which was the first to lay submarine cable in the Napoleonic era, was still at the forefront of information warfare in the cyber age.