those dates tie up with a lot of other stuff as well – both BT and Dave are genuinely telling the truth.
BT, GCHQ. The Security Service/Secret Intelligence Service, Ofcom and the BBC all work closely together on a lot of things and have done so for decades. much is obscure tech/operational stuff which isn’t even secret but unless not exactly easy to follow unless you are employed in networks/telecom engineering (and even then some of it is insanely complex)
they all have separate commercial and/or political agendas. GCHQ don’t get free network bandwidth, circuit provision costs are proportional to distance so locate some operations closer to where they want to gather the data.
Often this is in the secure area of the Telephone Exchange in a coastal location. Undersea cables from the North Sea circuits terminate there anyway; as well as there being many protected circuits for MOD use across England which are still valuable in peacetime – they are how HM Coastguard, the Met Office and nearby European nations communicate to exchange data about harsh weather and/or maritime/aviation emergencies.
British Telecom have a long running history of employing intelligent innovative people but having a ruthless yet dysfunctional management structure – its routine for them to employ smart people for years; ignore everything they say due to “lack of market demand” and then make them redundant. A few of them (especially the younger middle class lot) do occasionally join GCHQ or Ofcom in investigatory rôles which fuels the conspracy theories – its interesting to see how many of them claim to be “liberal/freedom loving” types but are perfectly happy to work for govt when a more secure job might be involved.
BT laid off most of the young, British middle class researchers around the time the economic depression started – around the same time Suffolk Constabulary had to deal with a spike of domestic violence including murders amongst a white middle class population they had never previously suspected of this (especially as they were the same people keeping the cops computers and radio equipment workng!)
Nowadays they seem to employ a skeleton staff of middle aged boffins and then try and get some Indians/Chinese to deliver their it at half the price but that doesn’t work either – although the Chinese have now bought some of the bits of BT that are useful (like the fibre optic research).
I know two retired engineers from there who taught the Chinese and Pakistanis to use a “British style telegraph pole” as a carrier for outdoor grade fibres. They had both retired before a single such pole has gone up anywhere in Blighty – but China Telecom had expanded their network along the (real) Silk Road to Pakistan.
