Ashley Sweetman
This guest post is the second of an occasional series of guest posts by external researchers who have used the Bank of England’s archives for their work on subjects outside traditional central banking topics.
What can the Bank of England Archive tell us about cyber security? The answer is almost certainly more than you might expect. For my PhD thesis Computer Security in the UK Financial Sector, 1960-1990, I visited the Bank Archives in the interests of being thorough, fully expecting to have exhausted relevant folders within a matter of hours. How wrong I was. They turned out to be a treasure trove of detail on historical computer security and informed a key part of my research. One particular piece of fragmentary evidence offered a window into a particularly secretive and little-known surveillance mechanism which the Bank and intelligence agencies feared and which was known only by its NATO codename, TEMPEST.