Government turns to social media to recruit spies

The government's listening agency – GCHQ (Government Communications, Headquarters, pictured) – is attempting to recruit fresh talent via an online competition.

The move is out character for the usually secretive organisation, which rarely communicates directly with the public or media.

GCHQ has developed a new website Can You Crack It, which invites visitors to crack an alphanumeric code. Once the code is solved, the successful participant is directed to GCHQ's recruitment pages.

At the time of writing there were 10 days and 10 hours left to complete the challenge.

The recruitment need at GCHQ was hinted at in October this year in the prime minister's Response to the Intelligence and Security Committee's Annual Report.

The document highlighted concerns that GCHQ was unable to find the right staff for its needs, but stated that additional funding would not be available to solve the problem.

"We are concerned about GCHQ's inability to retain a suitable cadre of internet specialists to respond to the threat.

"We therefore urge GCHQ to investigate what might be done within existing pay constraints to improve the situation."

Essentially, GCHQ is a spy agency, and as such maintains no official public-facing social media frontage. However, news of the challenge quickly spread through social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and around various forums.

It is possible that some of these posts and blogs were made unofficially by GCHQ insiders looking to drive traffic to the challenge.

The agency has produced publicly available challenges in the past, but this is thought to be the first aimed overtly at recruitment.