What would Gary McKinnon,the unemployed north Londoner who,a decade ago,executed what US officials called the biggest military computer hack of all time,say about the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) puzzle that invited code crackers and then directed the successful ones to a recruitment form? Offering an average entry salary of £30,000,the British government has been anything but competitive in recruiting hacker-spies to manage its SIGINT (signals intelligence),IA (information assurance) and to track cyber crime. However,with Foreign Secretary William Hague complaining of 600 hacks a day on government sites and Prime Minister David Cameron rebuking the GCHQ,things had to be updated. So came up the online puzzle which combined cryptography and steganography (the science of hiding information) a rectangular display of 160 character pairs set against a black background,with the legend above: _Can you crack it? A digital clock marked time as you decrypted it. Well,a number of people (officially) or about 50 (unofficially) have solved the puzzle posted last month well within the deadline of midnight December 11. British espionage might think it has come a long way since recruiting among the brightest at Oxbridge who built its reputation and humiliated it with the Cambridge Five but the GCHQ has drawn flak from two sets of critics. These are old timers (The digital pop age!) and tech-sceptics who either think little of technological complexity or devalue its evolutionary significance (How different is cyber code cracking from solving a cryptic crossword puzzle?) and hackers themselves who say the puzzle was too easy and amateur. Well,theres one truth espionage agencies looking to democratise recruitment cannot ignore hackers,ethical or otherwise,define democracy rather differently. And whats least cool to them is government.
