Katharine Gun Quotes
Working at GCHQ was a relatively easy, reliable job. As long as you always toe the 'party line', you are more or less guaranteed a job for life.
Gun, Katharine. "Iraq: no regrets about my GCHQ leak." The Guardian, Guardian News & Media, 25 Feb. 2013.
Kennedy was not being literal, but was sarcastically joking about the overemphasis that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI leadership was placing on investigating civil rights leaders and communists instead of investigating the hundreds of Southern murders and assaults on civil rights workers and organized crime. The FBI leadership was itself quite racist at the time, and Hoover never wanted to take on organized crime. He did not regard organized crime as an existential threat to the United States (the way he did about civil rights demonstrations) and he feared that with the big money available to organized crime, many of his agents would be corrupted.
Jones constantly told King and other associates that the FBI was tapping their telephone conversations. Senator Joseph McCarthy was a right wing paranoid who imagined communists throughout the government. Jones turned out to be right. During that period, the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the FBI was listening, recording, and transcribing, every single phone call to or from King including the conference calls and calls with his attorney. FBI Director received frequent briefings on what King and his associates were doing. Although he ordered the wiretaps, it was Robert F. Kennedy, then the Attorney General, who had to approve them.
The reason this quotation is famous is that Clapper answered “No, Sir”. 3 months later Edward Snowden disclosed the fact that the NSA was collecting some information from EVERY telephone call and e-mail made or sent in the United States. The colloquy became famous when the government tried to capture Snowden and try him for illegally revealing classified information when others saw him as a whistle blower who had told the truth and the guys who lied to Congress and the American people wanted to prosecute him.
to enhance its ability to conduct surveillance
The Great Firewall of China is the digital control system whereby the Chinese government can block the Chinese public from seeing web sites that are considered dangerous. Generally, these either involve pornography of political viewpoints unacceptable to the government.
Katharine Teresa Gun (née Harwood) (born 1974) is a British linguist who worked as a translator for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In 2003, she leaked top-secret information to The Observer, concerning a request by the United States for compromising intelligence on diplomats from member states of the 2003 Security Council, who were due to vote on a second United Nations resolution on the prospective 2003 invasion of Iraq.
