Stories about: GCHQ

The Australian arm of Seattle-based aircraft and defence technologies behemoth Boeing has won a $66 million deal to provide technology Australia's foreign eavesdropping agency, the Defence Signals Directorate.

If gentlemen prefer blondes then, it would appear, intelligence agencies prefer Linux. Or at least so it would seem judging by downloads on offer at OnSecure, a joint portal of the highly secretive signals intelligence collection agency the Defence Signals Directorate and the spam-busting National Office of the Information Economy.

The U.K. government on Friday agreed to participate in Microsoft Corp.'s Government Security Program (GSP), which gives agencies access to Windows source code in an effort to help ensure their systems are safe, Microsoft said Friday.

Even traditional British stoicism has a breaking point-and for more than half a million British citizens, that breaking point was sorely tested last summer by the introduction of a 120 million ($180 million) computer system at the country's Passport Agency. Processing times for passport applications stretched to eight weeks instead of the normal 10 days. As telephone calls went unanswered-over a million in May 1999 alone-people began turning up outside the agency's six regional offices to request their passports in person.

Governments that want to have an online presence face the same thorny security issues as companies on the Internet, according to a panel discussion here today.