Security whom!

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JUST what does GCHQ do that is supposed to be so important for everyone's security?

Tie main centre of GCHQ is two large buildings in Glouceslershire. Officially the work performed there involved 'the reception and analysis of foreign communications and other electronic transmissions for intelligence purposes' GCHQ deals with international communications — telephones, cables, telegrams and commercial satellites. It is a yital part of an integrated 'Sigint' (Signals Intelligence) nctwork.

'Sigint' was set up in 1947 and involves Britain (GCHQ) and the USA (National Security Agency) as senior partners, but also draws in the rest of NATO and France, and provides information for states such as Brazil or South Africa.

GCHO's main function is supposed to be to intercept and decode messages from the Soviet Union, especially those including information about iroop movements and the whereabouts of submarines. Within the 'Sigint' set-up GCHQ has special responsibility for Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, and Africa. International sub-stations and oulposts of GCHO exist in Hong Kong, Malta, Mauritius, Cyprus and Eastern Turkey. Under the Shah, GCHQ worked close to the Iranian-USSR border in an operation carried out jointly by British security services and the hated secret police, SAVAK.

However, there is evidence to suggest that GCHQ does not limit itself to narrowly defined military intelligence.

Firstly, it is admitted by the security services themselves that they cannot break the communications codes used by the USSR and China. That would seem to make a lot of the expensive listening devicTHE final total of strike-days for 1983 was 3.6 million - lower than any recent year except This Department of Employment figure, however, excludes about 135,000 strike-days in British Telecom, because that action is deemed 'political' ¡LABOUR AGAINST THE IWITCH-HUNT National Council meeting, Saturday February 11, fro 111.30 at County Hall, Loi İdon SE1 (Island Block CinLema). Creche available.

What's behind the scree of secrecy at GCHQ?

Tom Rigby investigates es at GCHQ worthle unless other uses can be : found for them.

Secondly, GCHQ has a warrant which allows it to intercept all international telegrams and cables comir ig into °D-nutice the Wir. bro19 '67 the affair broug ght to light the fact that all ov erseas Post Office Telegrams were collected and read by se ecurity officials.

Ten years later the president of Western Union, , a US communications con apany, told the US Senate thi at the British government ha id demanded copies of all ov erseas telegrams handled by the e company since 1945.

If the complex survei illance equipment at GCHQ is u Ised to monitor 'internal' dissen t, that would fit in with wh lat is already firmly establish ed about the NSA, the US 'pa irtner' to GCHQ.

An investigation in 1975 found that the NSA int ercepted international dele phone and telex messages from 'targeted' US citizens si ich as actress and anti Vietnar n war campaigner Jane Fonda.

The activities of GCHQ and Q and 'Sigint' are knitted together gether with those of other se curity forces in Britain. The main 'customers' of GCHQ are : MIS, MI6, and the Special Bra nch.

The political attitude ai ccording to which GCHQ is 1 run is indicated by the fact that t until recently its very existenc e was supposed to be a s ¡ecret. When journalists Duncan Campbell and Crispin A ubrey did some investigations ; into 'Sigint' ', they (and John I Berry, who had helped then i get information) were hauler d into court for their pains.

Thatcher Inc.

THATCHER'S government bosses' government and Thatcher's family are small bourgeois trying to get big. Thatcher uses her power to ge special privileges for her family.

Iwok at the case of Mark Thatcher, described by Penny Junior in her biography of the Prime Minister as 'an odious little boy"

He failed his accountancy exams but as a young man needing help he got it.

This was not difficult as his mum was first a rising politici and then Prime Minister and I dad was a wealthy, well-conne ted businessman. So he got Investigation Teams known as "Rabbits"

based during January.

GCHQ operates without even formal political control being exercised over it by elected politicians. According to Chapman Pincher, when James Callaghan was prime minister he used to receive a set of intercepted messages every morning in oblong yellow boxes from GCHQ. But he only got them on the basis of 'need to know'. The great bulk of the centre's operations were never known to him.

The 'national security' served by GCHQ is the 'security' of the British capitalist class, and capitalist state, against its international competitors and enemies, and against real or supposed threats to its rule in Britain itself.

The more GCHQ is disrupted, the more secure most people in Britain will be.

(Information from articles by Duncan Campbell in the "New Statesman') "introductions" to the right people.

The boy-wonder has only one thing going for him - his name. He has milked thousands of pounds from it by way of token TV appearances and advertising and thanks to the direct intervention of the Prime Minister got himself a six-figure sum (probably around £350,000) just for pushing a construction contract in the Sheikhdom of Oman in the direction of the British company Cementation Ltd.

Maybe one day Mark Thatcher will do us all a favou and get lost in a desert for good.

Brixton TEN people have died over tł last 12 months in Brixton Jail Nine of those who have die were on remand and at least seven were found hanging in their cells.

According to Dr. Stephen Shaw of the Prison Reform Trust, the medical wing of the prison, where those on remand are held waiting for psychiatric and medical reports, was "a most disgraceful place.

The prison, built in the 1850s, is, in Shaw's words, "decrepit, dilapidated and overcrowded."

Brixton Prison is not untypical of a large number of jails in Britain, better described as 'penal dustbins' It is time the labour movement started to fight for the rights of prisoners who are at the sharp end of the Turies. attempts to impose a brutal primitive 'law and order' SQUAOS STOP THESE HIT indeed compared with the tax defrauders."

exercise.

The Unemployed CPSA's solidarity, by union ban.

Let them sleep rough! Over two million people are homeless in the USA, the richest country on earth. They sleep rough and live as they can, in the 'land of the free and home of the brave' Is this a matter of concern to President Reagan _ or even of shame?

Nut at all, it seems.

It may even be a matter of pride to the liberty-loving old duffer.

It's a free country, isn't it?

On television recently, Reagan dismissed the idea that peop le sleep out because they can't afford to do anything else. He thinks they do it of their own free will.

It is, so to speak, an eccentric variant of the "American way' Reagan is for every variant of the 'American way'. As the Financial Times headlined the story: 'Reagan defends people' right to sleep rough' . Long live liberty!

'Liberty _ what crimes are committed in thy name?' ", said the moderate revolutionary Madame Rolland on her way to an undeserved death under the Jacobin guillotine in 1794.

It could of course be truthfully THESE HIT said today that the greatest crimes in history _ against ten of millions of people _ have been committed in the 20th cen tury not in the name of liberty but by those who took a dismissive attitude to 'liberty'.

But the most powerful of the poisonous roots of the Stalinist and authoritarian 'state socialist' attitudes to liberty is still what the bourgeoisie makes of the cry for 'liberty'. And that liberty alone is not enough.

Liberty which includes the right of the capitalist to exploit and to monopolise ownership and control of the means of production is at best a negative freedom from tyranny, not a positive liberty to share freely and equally in the good things o: life.

Anatole France delivered the classic socialist indictment of the limits of bourgeois liberty when he wrote: 'The law in its majestic equality forbids the rict as well as the poor to steal bread, to sleep under bridges. and tu beg for food"

It does not help if Reagan Do% permits the rich as well as she pour tu sleep under bridges

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Organiser 65 February Page ruey-

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