September 2015

On 18 October the BBC’s Security Correspondent, Gordon Corera, will give a talk at Bletchley Park about his new book which traces the intertwined history of computing and espionage, Intercept – The Secret History of Computers and Spies.

The computer was born to spy. Under the intense pressure of the Second World War and in the confines of Bletchley Park, the work of men like Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers led to the birth of the computing age. It was a breakthrough that helped win the war and which cemented the importance of signals intelligence and also a close alliance between the US and UK. In the following decades, computers transformed espionage from Cold War spy hunting and providing advance warning of nuclear war through to today’s data driven pursuit of terrorists and industrial scale cyber-espionage against corporations. Gordon Corera reveals for the first time how – beginning at Bletchley - the history of computers has been shaped by spying and in turn how spying has been changed by computers. He will look at the legacy of Bletchley and how it matters for us all.

He told the Bletchley Park Podcast how a book about technology turned out to be a book about people.

Tickets are available from the Bletchley Park online shop https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/shop/p.rhtm/130872/908465-BletchleyParkPresents_GordonCoreraSunday18_October.html

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