David Pepper

Sir David Edwin Pepper KCMG (born 8 February 1948) is a British civil servant who was the director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British signals intelligence agency, from 2003 to 2008.

Career Pepper was educated at Chigwell School and gained a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University. He joined GCHQ in 1972, and worked in intelligence operations. Following his retirement from GCHQ, Pepper became a non-executive director of Gloucestershire County Council.

Pepper was director of GCHQ at the time of the 7 July 2005 London bombings and told the subsequent committee into the attacks that they were "a demonstration that there were [deleted] conspiracies going on about which we essentially knew nothing, and that rather sharpens the perception of how big...the unknown unknown was."

It was under Pepper's tenure as GCHQ director that the Tempora data collection programme was instigated, with trials beginning at GCHQ Bude in Cornwall in 2008. Tempora extracts and processes data from international fiber-optic communications.

Pepper contributed a chapter to the January 2010 issue of the Public Policy and Administration journal entitled The Business of Sigint: The Role of Modern Management in the Transformation of GCHQ. An extract from his chapter was published in The Guardian in December 2009. In the article Pepper outlined how modern corporate management techniques had been used to change the operating culture of GCHQ following the end of the Cold War. Pepper said that “Nobody wants the easy stuff anymore and there is no point spending effort and money collecting it...Thanks to Google Maps and Streeview anyone can today see photographic detail of far away countries which hitherto would have been available only through secret and highly sophisticated national satellites."