It's also true that this is pretty common practice for intelligence work.

Whether you call it "an institutional culture of secrecy" or "sensibly limiting attack surface", there are numerous stories of intelligence projects circumventing allies, other agencies, or even other branches of their same agency. Involving outsiders tends to be viewed as a tradeoff between courtesy plus access and lost secrecy plus bureaucracy.

Now, it's also true that intelligence agencies have a habit of grabbing whatever they can once they open a channel. But at least for the initial decision, I agree that the GCHQ would be pretty likely to bypass any other agency they didn't think could substantially help their work or punish the discourtesy. Which would be mostly limited to the NSA and maybe the rest of Five Eyes.

Plus since the Paris attacks, it is fair to assume that all european intelligence services care about what's happening in Belgium.

No. Belgium is the prime target in Europe for decades.

It featured a NATO putsch, a CIA-backed fascist network that made it into government (a singularity in Central Europe), NATO, EU, Swift. Plus the Dutroux coverup, exposing the criminality of the government networks. Islamist terrorist networks should be the least of their worries.

   a singularity in Central Europe

Lucky they aren't in Central Europe, then - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe#/media/File:Cen... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe#States

To be honest, I'd like to cast some doubt on the NATO putsch and the fascist network too, but I have no idea what' you're even talking about. Bende Van Nijvel and Vlaams blok/belang maybe? The Dutroux cover-up is the only thing that might be upgraded to crackpot theory.

There are serious problems with non-integrated muslims here, and they are a serious worry. But terrorism is the smallest part of that, even if delivers the nicest stories for the media.

From that wiki page, we have:

> According to Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon, Central Europe is a part of Europe composed of Austria, Belgium, [...] as well as northeastern France.

and:

> Nevertheless, [Benelux countries] are occasionally mentioned in the Central European context due to cultural, historical and linguistic ties.

It's needlessly pedantic to pick on this part of the OPs comment when there are bigger issues evident: it just detracts from your main point.

Baron de Bonvoisin and Paul Vanden Boeynants of course.

There's also the fact that SWIFT is based in Belgium. If you want to track international financial flows, that's pretty important.

There is also a lot of EU bureaucracy. Bruxelles lives almost exclusively on that, these days.

So have the Belgian security services denied giving permission to the UK to hack Belgacom yet?

I'm from the UK, GCHQ are criminally underfunded and pay 20-30% below market rate for similar skills in the private sector. Might be common across a lot of intel agencies

I'm from the UK too.

Good.

GCHQ are not there to protect the interestes of British citizens, they are there to enforce the status quo of the ruling class and engage in economic espionage.

So many of there operations are counter to democratic principles, I'd prefer them underfunded and ineffective than funded and potent.

I think that's a bit much. Most people who work there probably do believe in the "mission", and believe that they are protecting the interests of not just British citizens but a broader set of "goodies" against the "baddies". It's a long, long time since the average employee could have seen themselves in terms of a "ruling class".

The real problem is, when all you (think you) see every day are "baddies", it's too easy to forget that the vast, vast majority of the world are not "baddies", and that what might, possibly, in the right light be suspicious behaviour for a "baddy" isn't even slightly suspicious most of the time. From there flows a slightly paranoid mindset of "we must stop ALL the evil in the world at any cost".

This is compounded by the fact that they appear to have rather less accountability than the typical civil servant. Some elements (but by no means all) do like it that way and actively campaign to limit any increase in oversight because (as they see it) "making our job harder makes the world less safe".

You often see the same thing in law enforcement and it's very hard to protect against that culture over the long term. We don't have enough people in politics or government who are willing to say "this will make your job harder but it's not worth doing unless you do it ethically".

I'm surprised this is the first of this sentiment I'm seeing in the thread; I totally agree. I feel the same way about some other services; the police, for instance, which enforce unjust laws.

It's definitely the case even in the US, which is generally the poster child for "successful digital surveillance".

Between low salaries and high selectivity, it's tough to find staff. The FBI has talked about how their marijuana use rules are a major impediment to hiring programmers, and some wings of US Cyber Command have apparently been trying and largely failing to train up talent internally because they can't recruit enough. (And that's after "fully staffed" was redefined downwards several times.) Turnover is apparently also sky-high, especially for civilian contractors.

Even the NSA is mostly in that situation, though. Or on the non-intelligence side of things, the US Digital Service is the same. They've both managed to pull in a lot of top-tier talent regardless, thanks to some mix of civic duty, prestige, and the promise of work you can't do elsewhere.

Which raises the question: what actually determines staff counts and quality? If salaries are crap everywhere, why have some countries gotten so much more talent than others?

Language and history of the field matter quite a bit.

Salaries are most certainly not crap everywhere, btw. I bet Russian, Iranian, or Turkish cyber-forces are well-paid for their regions, and in Israel there are matters of practical survival that somewhat trump the allure of money.

There's some rumblings about this improving, but as with a lot of things in the UK the current government is walking a tightrope in terms of funding (they've got to keep a lot of special interest groups on-side in order to pass any legislation). They'd rather go for high-profile, popular funding opportunities than putting more of the budget aside for shady shenanigans like GCHQ.

GCHQ is criminally overfunded. It’s only task is to convincingly communicate to the tax payer that they are under immediate threat of attack, ever time they get the megaphone passed to them. Payed to be paranoid, and extremely well and with shit loads of perks along the way.

US intel agencies are way worse than 20-30% below market, given how high comp is in tech. It’s a huge problem for them.

Sounds more like it.

I’m not really in tech, and took about a 20% pay decrease (on-paper) for public sector pay.

But they pay 12% on top of my salary to a real pension plan, I get 1-2 extra holidays that most others don’t get. I get paid to be on-call. Better disability insurance. Education fund. Benefits package includes RMT massage therapy without a prescription. Better parental leave coverage.

When you add it up, the “lower-pay” in public sector ignores total compensation, but probably is true in tech.

I’ll take a good paycheque over a games room and free snacks.

Public sector employees don't get social security benefits because their employer doesn't pay payroll taxes. So be sure to factor that in.