• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, December 1, 2011

Just because you’re in the spy business doesn’t mean you can’t use some good exposure every now and then, especially if you’re looking to recruit top talent in highly competitive areas like computer science and programming. That’s the thinking behind a new online challenge from Britain’s Government Communications, Headquarters (GCHQ) -- home to Her Majesty’s Government Signal Intelligence, the U.K.’s main eavesdropping agency, the equivalent of the U.S. NSA -- inviting all comers to crack an alphanumeric code online, which leads them in turn to a recruitment center.

Of course, there are some challenges to “help wanted” advertising for spooks. Because GCHQ is cloaked in secrecy -- most people haven’t even heard of the organization -- it doesn’t usually maintain a social media presence. Thus the agency created an independent Web site, Can You Crack It, to host the online challenge, which is ticking down to a deadline (about ten days from now as I write this). And for the first time it is publicizing the challenge -- and its own existence -- on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social media forums.

Despite their purposeful obscurity, the GCHQ and GSI have a storied past: in the Second World War, when they were known as the Government Code and Cypher School, their specialists at Bletchley Park cracked the German military’s supposedly impenetrable Enigma code in the “Ultra” program. The intelligence gathered through the Enigma/Ultra program, including coded radio communications with German U-boats operating in the Atlantic Ocean, helped the Allies achieve victory in Europe.

In previous posts I’ve written about other government agencies using social media for intelligence-gathering and surveillance. For example, in November the Associated Press reported that a CIA team informally known as the “vengeful librarians" is monitoring Facebook, Twitter, and chat rooms -- as well as newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, and so one -- to detect emerging threats to national security and U.S. interests overseas.

At the state level, Colorado's Department of Public Safety is employing analysts at the Colorado Information Analysis Center to monitor sites like Twitter and Facebook with an eye to gleaning information about potentially disruptive events before they happen. By monitoring social media conversations in real time, the CDPS analysts hope to be able to identify emerging threats within minutes of the first discussion by online plotters -- which should hopefully allow law enforcement to preempt, for example, apparently spontaneous outbursts of civil disorder.