GCHQ: Minority Report
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2016
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The domestic challenge facing Britain's biggest secret intelligence service. What's stopping members of the ethnic minorities from playing a key part in Britain's spy network: discrimination, loyalty or simple old-fashioned prejudice? DJ Nihal Arthanayake, Five Live and Asian Network presenter, gets rare access to GCHQ, the government's secret communication headquarters in Cheltenham Spa. He talks to staff from the black, Asian and ethnic minorities and hears from members of those communities outside about their attitude to the intelligence-gathering organisation. A report leaked to the Sunday Times six years ago suggested that black and Asian intelligence officers were concerned about there being a racist culture. If GCHQ's workforce was truly representative of Britain's ethnic makeup, then 12 per cent would be black, Asian or from other ethnic minorities, but it's not even a quarter of that. Can the organisation change?
Produced by Mark Savage.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:07.0 | We know we're being watched. |
| 0:11.0 | But who's watching us? |
| 0:18.0 | And how much do they really know about the idiosyncrasies of our lives, our backgrounds and our cultures? I'm Rhiana Dylan, and today's seriously interesting story is all about the world of surveillance |
| 0:26.7 | and issues of ethnicity at the heart of the UK government's communications headquarters, GQ. GQ. |
| 0:33.0 | Because it has a problem, it's almost entirely white. |
| 0:37.0 | You come here and you think, |
| 0:39.0 | where do the brothers hang out? |
| 0:42.0 | And they want to change that. But there's a definite |
| 0:45.1 | feeling in some circles that if someone from that background joins GQ |
| 0:49.1 | they're to spy on their own. We have had in the past certain people being asked to join the |
| 0:55.7 | security service to spy on their friends or their community members and that's |
| 1:01.0 | the wrong approach. My personal feelings are very much that we're not, or GSHU or the wider security services aren't targeting Muslims. |
| 1:10.0 | They're targeting people who exhibit certain behaviors. |
| 1:13.0 | So how does GQ fix this? How does it balance actively seeking to employ people from ethnically diverse backgrounds |
| 1:21.0 | with a distrust some people have for the Intelligence Agency. This is |
| 1:25.8 | seriously and this is G. C. H. Q. Minority Report. Ground. |
| 1:37.0 | It's out of the lift and into a taxi. |
| 1:40.0 | It's out of the lift and into a taxi. |
| 1:45.0 | I'm Nihal Arthur Aikka. |
| 1:47.0 | People struggle with my name, so I'm mostly known just as Nihal. |
| 1:51.0 | My day job is presenter on Five Live and the Asian Network, where I get to play music like this. |
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