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Comment by askl56 | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by it's a job ad?

I think johansch means to say this is something someone should have made only to add to his cv or similar(not even fully sure) rather than something that people should use.

No one is telling the user what he should use this for, there's plenty of situations where you might want to convert/encrypt/elaborate data without being launch codes for nuclear missiles and this seems like a pretty good tool, all browser based too, opposite of many other more famous tools that require communication with a server.

I think he is actually saying it is an effort to get people to say "look at the cool stuff we make" and go work for the organization. In this case that organization appears to be the UK equivalent of the CIA/NSA in the US and he clearly feels their mission erodes people's rights.

I guess I should have been more explicit.

I am not talking about the actual encryption/decryption/data-wrangling stuff in this HTML page. All of this is obviously very neat and very usable.

The reason I do think this is a job ad is the fact that it's the GCHQ that is publishing it. Seriously, a spook agency is publishing neat open source stuff. I can only think of two reasons for this to happen and both align:

a) employee happiness (few people enjoy doing stuff in secrecy, I think)

b) using the by now well-established mechanics of corporate branding to make the GCHQ appealing to a larger amount of developers/hackers.

I think the latter is the dominant factor, and this is why I called this a job ad.

c) helping private companies maintain good security might be a good fit with GCHQ's mandate.

d)"Just-your-friendly-security-agency!"

...right.

Why do you think the GCHQ is publishing stuff that appeals the developers/hackers rather than just being secretive? Of course it's similar to a corporate branding exercise. There's a hard fight for tech talent these days.

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