![]() Most people do." ( Burkeman and Norton-Taylor :2014). Gun had previously been unaware of GCHQ, later saying that "I didn't have much idea about what they did.I was going into it pretty much blind. (Marcia and Thomas Mitchell:2008).įinding it difficult to find work as a linguist, Gun applied to the Government Communications Headquarters,(GCHQ), a British intelligence agency, after reading a newspaper advertisement for the organization. After spending her childhood in Taiwan where she attended Morrison Academy, Gun studied Japanese and Chinese at Durham University in England. ![]() Her father Paul Harwood was a lecturer in European literature at Taiwan's Tunghai University. but was raised by her British parents in Taiwan. Katharine Teresa Gun was born in 1974 in the U.K. There are two options, both of them are nasty: either (i) you keep silent, keep your job, and save your skin, but then you will live like a “degraded, humiliated slave” with a heavy conscience and you may lose your sanity or (ii) you stand up to the lying, deception, and corruption of your boss, but you lose your job, you lose your rights, you put yourself, your family and everything else at risk and you may have to fight for your rights for the rest of your life. It is a real dilemma when you find out that your boss or bosses are breaking the law or they are corrupt top executives whom you should deal with and obey their instructions because your job requires you to do so. It is absolutely illegal and immoral to abuse any information, confidential or otherwise, to hurt innocent people and inflict damages on other organizations or other nations. When an organization or a boss uses this “confidential information” for illegal purposes, corruption, thievery, a destructive war against other nations, then the employee concerned has no obligation, legal or moral, to keep silent and allow the abuse of the “confidential information” for evil purposes. The concept of “confidential information” should be limited to the information that is within the law and is kept secret for the common interests of the organization, the public in general, the safety and security of the country and the world. In June 2003 she was sacked from her job. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.” (Adams:2019) “You work for the British government,” her interrogator said, with a sneer. Gun was asked by Special Branch officers why she had chosen to act as she had. It was in a police cell that she uttered those two sentences that now seem to define the person she was and is. She was arrested and charged with breach of the Official Secrets Act. Gun owned up to the leak a few days later to save her GCHQ colleagues from a witch-hunt. “The Observer published the dirty tricks memo as a front-page splash just over two weeks before the invasion. She was also hoping that she would stay anonymous and nobody would discover her. So Kathrine “leaked” some confidential information to the press hoping she would contribute to help stop the war. She refused to be silent when she found out that the British Government in 2003 lead by Tony Blair was lying to the world about the justifications to invade Iraq. She was working as a translator at the British Government Communications Headquarters, (GCHQ), a British intelligence agency. As always and with his usual penetrating hard questions, Stephen was brilliant in the show and Kathrine Gun demonstrated herself to be a woman of conscience, principles and moral values. ![]() Stephen was talking to Kathrine Gun, a British Intelligence whistleblower. I watched with great interest an episode of the HARDtalk show presented by Stephen Sacker on BBC on the morning of Saturday, 19 October 2019. “I do not work for the British Intelligence I work for the British People” - Kathrine Gun: A British Intelligence Whistleblower*
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