Ghost Shift - helping governments and industry achieve information dominance
In this episode, we talk with Tom Sefton-Collins, a former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of Ghost Shift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
We discuss Europe's rearmament, why information has become a strategic capability in its own right, the challenges defence organisations face when navigating vast amounts of data, and how Ghost Shift is helping to make faster, better-informed decisions through intelligent software.
Find Out More: https://www.ghost-shift.com
Production, Design & Artwork: HIATUS ↗ The Defence Design & Communications Agency
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Transcript
00:00:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hi, welcome to the Future Frontiers podcast from millilux.io.
00:00:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
In this episode, we talk with Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
00:00:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We discuss Europe's rearmament, where information has become a strategic capability in its own right, the challenges defence organisations face when navigating vast amounts of data,
00:00:26 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
and how GoShift is helping make faster, better informed decisions through intelligent software.
00:00:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hey Tom, thank you so much for joining us on the Mililux Future Frontiers podcast.
00:00:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I realise you've got a busy afternoon, so I'll roll straight into the questions.
00:00:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
To kick us off, please can you give us a really concise one-minute introduction to yourself?
00:00:52 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yep, so I'm Tom Sefton Collins.
00:00:54 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I'm the co-founder and CEO of GhostShift.
00:00:57 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
a UK-based company that specialises in online capabilities to deliver intelligence and influence.
00:01:04 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
For 15 years I worked in the UK government in a variety of departments, mostly in law enforcement and the intelligence community.
00:01:12 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
But the last decade of that was spent in GCHQ and the National Cyber Force where I specialised in the convergence between the cyber domain and the human domain and how you elicit intelligence and
00:01:24 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
change behaviour for the use of cyber and human behaviour.
00:01:29 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating stuff.
00:01:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm really keen.
00:01:31 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think you're probably the first person we've had on here that's on GCHQ and NC apps.
00:01:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm really keen to dive into that.
00:01:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I realise there'll be a lot of sensitive spaces, so we won't dive too far into that.
00:01:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I do want to get your take, though, from a defence perspective.
00:01:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Obviously, yesterday we had the UK's defence investment plan announced.
00:01:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I was going to get your take.
00:01:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
What's your perspective on the UK's dip
00:01:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
and Europe's rearming efforts right now?
00:01:58 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yes, obviously it's a really challenging issue for the UK and Europe more widely.
00:02:04 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And I think the problem lies in the kind of the genesis of warfare as we know it, in that the evolution to kind of hybrid gray space warfare creates an unprecedented challenge for the UK and its NATO allies, in that the capabilities and hardware that we've built to fight wars over
00:02:24 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
decades and decades are increasingly less relevant and we have to transition to an alternative kind of warfare to respond to threats in the cyber, information, grey space and hybrid domain.
00:02:38 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And the problem that brings is that those capabilities are death by files and cuts kind of capabilities that are being used against us rather than a hard conflict starting on our border or very close to it.
00:02:54 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that inherently creates a problem in the kind of our understanding as a nation of the threat and the warfare that exists within that threat space.
00:03:02 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So there's obviously a very significant amount of challenge and consideration that's been given to it.
00:03:08 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I think in general, more defence spending is required.
00:03:11 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I support NATO's move to increase percentage of GDP towards the requisite levels and the UK's targets within that.
00:03:20 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
But
00:03:22 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
We have an inherent challenge in that, what do we, what do we cut, what can we afford and what do we prioritise spending on in order to do that.
00:03:30 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And I think, circling back to that first point, the conversation isn't quite there with the public in terms of the manifestation of warfare in this century, what our adversaries are doing, how they're doing it, how they're using grey space warfare in particular.
00:03:46 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
and what that means for us in everyday life and what impact it's having on us as a nation and how we need to counter it.
00:03:52 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so I think that conversation desperately needs to happen to actually explain to the public why increased defence spending is needed and what it's being spent on and how it's going to make us more secure and resilient as a society and unfortunately where we have to draw the line in terms of cuts and cost reduction elsewhere to make that happen.
00:04:11 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I think the second thing as well I'd say is that from our perspective the
00:04:16 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
there is a kind of limited inclusion of information-based capabilities and investments and stratcoms-based capabilities and investments within the DIP.
00:04:26 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And as I've just said, the nature of the threat against ourselves and our allies is evolving and our adversaries are operating at pace and scale using human-based efforts, operating without the same guardrails, policies or values that we operate with.
00:04:44 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that's creating another inherent challenge for us.
00:04:47 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And the information domain and the use of propaganda and disinformation, misinformation, and other hybrid techniques is having a damaging impact on our society and our security.
00:04:58 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And the dip doesn't really demonstrate how we're going to counter that.
00:05:01 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And there's a bit of a gap there, in my opinion.
00:05:03 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And actually, there is a number of billion ballparked for
00:05:11 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
upgrades to the electronic warfare and cyber command, then information defence is an inherent part of that.
00:05:17 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Actually, I think the dip needs to call out more strongly how information-based warfare, how hybrid warfare is impacting the UK and its allies and where spending is being invested to counter that threat.
00:05:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, 100%.
00:05:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, and I'm really glad you raised kind of grading activities like below the threshold
00:05:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
conflict.
00:05:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
That's something we've been massively interested in for a long time now because it seems, certainly from my perspective in Iraq, kind of Afghan era generation, is that it was very easy to contextualize what defence was when you had,
00:05:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
images and video on BBC News showing British soldiers deployed in, hot dusty environments where you had like a more of a consistent narrative of we are here doing this because of XYZ.
00:06:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Although that narrative kind of.
00:06:07 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
shifted, we won't kind of get into that mission creep and that kind of disparity in this podcast, but I do completely agree that it's an easier thing to explain when you say we need more Type 45 destroyers, we need more tanks, we need more this or that.
00:06:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
When you're talking about conventional munitions, it's easy to kind of allocate cost based on an outcome, isn't it?
00:06:31 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Whereas
00:06:31 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
more like the information space, it's a harder thing to justify.
00:06:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I think kind of within recent memory, obviously you've had the big cyber attacks on Jaguar Land Rover, on Marks and Spencer's and bigger, you know, kind of big multinational commerce companies.
00:06:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think the public is now starting to come around more to, well, we need cyber security to defeat these, you know, these threats that are taking down British businesses.
00:06:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And if it means
00:06:59 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
people lose their jobs, then there is a very visible outcome from that, from that lack of kind of defence investment in that space.
00:07:07 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yeah, absolutely.
00:07:09 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Absolutely.
00:07:09 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I couldn't agree more.
00:07:10 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And I think you just touched on there, but it's kind of the multi-domain impact of information warfare and how it absolutely impacts commerce and industry, defence and also society at the same time and all those areas are under attack.
00:07:25 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And even in a more, in a more kind of tangible sense.
00:07:27 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So a couple of weeks ago, there was an arson attack on the Prime Minister's home address, enabled through the online environment, through a handler, using messaging service to recruit and carry out that attack.
00:07:39 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that is a very tangible way of saying, look, the information domain is being used for cyber attack, but also real world hybrid implementation as well.
00:07:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, whilst we won't get into crypto on this podcast as well, because we've already got a limited amount of time.
00:07:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I realised that there's a whole there's a whole new areas we could dive into when it comes to, you know, these crazy activities.
00:08:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But it didn't get me on to my next question is I'm really interested to hear, understand what is GoShift and how did it come to be?
00:08:12 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yeah, so GoShift is a UK-based business.
00:08:16 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
We are still an SME.
00:08:18 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
We're very new.
00:08:20 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
But we specialise in using covert capabilities to collect intelligence from hard to reach spaces in the online environments using personas.
00:08:30 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And we use those personas and platforms to gather, sorry, to influence behaviour in the online space as well, whether that be through a small closed group based interaction with individuals or whether it is
00:08:44 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
through a platform that helps do strat comms or other information to a target audience.
00:08:49 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And what we offer to our clients is a means to covertly access hard to reach spaces that they can't through other means and ensure they're able to gather intelligent data from those spaces, but also critically, how do they influence and shape behaviour in those spaces before it filters out into a wider target audience.
00:09:09 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that's
00:09:10 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
That's based on direct expertise from doing these kinds of capabilities and operations in government for over a decade.
00:09:16 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Where that came from is working in government.
00:09:22 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I recognise that, as we've alluded to earlier in the podcast, the information domain is growing exponentially in terms of threats.
00:09:32 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And we touched on a minute ago just all the different areas of domains that it's touching.
00:09:38 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And
00:09:39 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
the need for these capabilities, the need to be able to access hard to reach spaces, closed groups, platforms, private chats, the need to be able to create content that resonates with target audiences who aren't reading Stratcoms or military briefings of some sort, actually operate and exist on Telegram or operate and exist on WhatsApp or use Instagram or use any other of these applications and get their news and media through those is growing day by day.
00:10:07 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so
00:10:08 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
more capabilities needed for that space.
00:10:10 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
That's primarily what we want to bring more capability to HMG and its partners to allow them to carry out more of these operations.
00:10:18 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
But crucially, what we're seeing in the information domain now is on top of that kind of exponential growth, that more and more actors are coming to the space who aren't necessarily bad actors or hostile actors.
00:10:29 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So they're not necessarily hostile state actors or cyber criminals.
00:10:34 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
They're attention actors.
00:10:36 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
They are looking for content that resonates
00:10:38 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
and it goes viral and trends with a new kind of consumer.
00:10:42 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And they jump on those trends and create more of that content because it gets likes, because it gets clicks, because it drives revenue.
00:10:49 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
They have not got a political, geopolitical or threat agenda.
00:10:54 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
They are simply following the trends and jumping on those.
00:10:56 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And the trends that lend themselves most to those kinds of attention actors are crises, conflicts and other geopolitical events that really raise a temperature in any given society.
00:11:07 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And one example we saw recently through our operations and GoShift was in the early days of the conflict in Iran, where, as sure you remember, footage of drone strikes, missile strikes was all over everyone's news feed, all over news.
00:11:26 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And we saw attention actors creating content that wasn't in support of US, Israel, Iran or anyone else, but was showing
00:11:37 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
missiles landing in Tel Aviv and Tehran and elsewhere, that was completely generative material.
00:11:44 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
It was fake content.
00:11:46 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
But it was deployed to grab that attention and quit that shock and show people more of the kind of explosions and military-style content they were looking for that was going viral at that moment.
00:11:57 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And they weren't, as I say, they weren't like a
00:12:00 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Iranian-backed actor, although a US-based actor, they were simply just creating content they would think would resonate, meet the trend, go viral, and capture that attention.
00:12:11 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that is the new threat that we're all dealing with in this space is not only are you contesting kind of your primary actor, the hostile state actor, the cyber criminal, or the terrorist actor, whoever that might be, but actually you need to operate in an environment where you consider attention actors and how they're going to respond to your content, your stratcoms, how your
00:12:30 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
targets are going to respond to that and how you deploy capability that recognises that as a kind of threat continuum at the same time.
00:12:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Real quick, if you want to hear when new episodes and articles are released, be sure to sign up to our newsletter at the Mililux website or find a link in the show notes below.
00:12:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But now, back to the episode.
00:12:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:12:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I've made a load of notes here just to
00:12:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
kind of stay up with it, like capturing that attention, the raising the temperature attention actors.
00:13:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm sure there's a lot of people here who probably resonate with seeing that kind of stuff on their Instagram feed, on their TikTok feed, or their, you know, lesser LinkedIn these days.
00:13:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But you can definitely see that the platforms that kind of amplify that stuff that keep eyeballs glued to it for, you know, advertising ad rev, the feeding the algorithm, kind of better data and stuff.
00:13:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And so actually you kind of got this bit of a
00:13:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, haven't you, where people create that war **** so to call it the platform realises it's getting more eyeballs on.
00:13:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
There's a whole psychology around people.
00:13:38 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
The more time you spend on the platform, the more sticky you stay to that platform and so on and so forth.
00:13:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I can see how there's a real like national security kind of connection to this new paradigm.
00:13:51 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's something we saw, I would say, probably
00:13:55 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Probably about a decade ago in the Marines, I've noticed this kind of shift towards the information space and how that was kind of influencing kind of defence and stuff.
00:14:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I guess, how does your how does GoShift kind of support defence more broadly or defence companies more broadly?
00:14:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I can definitely see the shifting perception element for national security, probably understanding how it might how you might kind of integrate with the likes of
00:14:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
uncrewed systems or your AI-enabled decision support organisations?
00:14:34 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yes, I mean, the perspective we take is, as you touched on, the information domain is the integrated part of any conflict any time, and whether that be like a, large-scale conflict, whether it be a hybrid conflict, or whether it be some kind of like tactical operation that you want to conduct in support of strategic objectives.
00:14:52 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And
00:14:55 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
any military unit needs to be considering how they are going to utilize the information domain or how the information domain might impact impact their capability.
00:15:05 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And, going back to, the raid on Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, I can't even remember how many years ago now at the top of my head, is it 10 years ago now?
00:15:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
15 years ago, I think 15 years ago, 15 years ago, the.
00:15:22 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
There was a tweet made about hearing helicopters over there as that raid took place.
00:15:26 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that was 15 years ago.
00:15:27 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so you consider what that would be like now and how media would be, and social media platforms and content would be used to kind of reveal, expose and create content about that in this day and age.
00:15:40 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And any kind of military action needs to have a conceptualization and an implementation of information warfare as part of that.
00:15:48 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So
00:15:49 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I can't speak specifically about what we do in the defence space with our partners and customers, but what we bring to the table is an understanding of the information environment and how to use specialist tradecraft to operate in that environment and how you can deploy capability to help defend against information attack or to use the information environment to secure and deliver against your tactical or strategic objectives.
00:16:17 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that might be something as simple as there is a whole host of content already about this subject.
00:16:23 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So let's call it the strikes that we talked about earlier.
00:16:26 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
How do we interject into that environment and create content that actually confuses the adversary, makes it a more messy picture and less understandable, actually gives an opposing narrative or maybe reveals something we want the adversary to see.
00:16:42 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So it creates a psychological impact and changes their
00:16:45 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
decision-making calculus and behaviour in the real world.
00:16:48 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And there are options available to you once you understand the information domain, how it's being utilised, what factors are at play, and how you can inject content that resonates and lands into a number of target audiences to help achieve your objectives.
00:17:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Got it, got it.
00:17:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It kind of occurred to me when you were saying that, I was like, okay, I understand now.
00:17:07 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's essentially it's the modern deception plan in any military
00:17:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
in any military operation.
00:17:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So if those have been through kind of commissioning courses for Cranwell or Sandhurst or Limpster or Dartmouth will remember there's that you're always you're always taught to kind of understand the deception plan and it's a classic Clausewitzian concept where any whatever you're going to do you need to make sure you counter and that your opponent doesn't have their strength in the place where you tend to intend to strike.
00:17:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I can completely understand it now.
00:17:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You could say
00:17:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
the modern deception plan is in the information landscape, is creating enough content, enough messaging, narratives, information to suggest that you're going to do something else and then you're able to kind of pivot and perhaps strike that.
00:18:01 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yeah, absolutely.
00:18:02 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I mean, it's that and it's also, do you want to expose some information that actually helps with your objective?
00:18:08 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Do you want to create a level of fear and anxiety in the adversary?
00:18:12 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Because, I don't know, for instance, you may be carrying out a strike somewhere and actually you want the amplification of the psychological elements of that strike to have far further reaching consequences to an adversary than the actual strike itself.
00:18:26 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So there's both sides of the coin.
00:18:27 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
What we call it go shift is information dominance.
00:18:30 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
We want to help our customers and partners achieve information dominance through the information warfare.
00:18:37 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that could either be, I'd say, in a kind of deceptive or defensive kind of posture, or it can be in a more kind of proactive posture as well where you're seeking to put content out there that has a behavioural effect.
00:18:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, got it, got it.
00:18:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I was literally just noting down and then I was like Operation Mince Meat was a classic example of this kind of stuff, not only because it was a, the corpse was to be made to look like a Royal Marines major, but watched it recently and I was like, it's such a timeless kind of concept, isn't it?
00:19:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
put information out there which you want somebody to do something, analyse in the wrong way with.
00:19:11 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So, yeah, and that, you know, it's super important.
00:19:15 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And those World War Two examples are
00:19:19 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
amazing examples of how to use these kind of capabilities in a real world context.
00:19:23 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And a lot of that was born of excellent understanding of cultural significance of how the Germans planned and thought and what they were doing.
00:19:32 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And we apply the same kind of concepts and ways of working at Go Shift.
00:19:35 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So we have linguistic and cultural experts for target environments that allow us to think like a certain target audience and put content that is culturally, emotionally and linguistically relevant to that target
00:19:47 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
audience rather than saying, as a British person sat here, I think this will work.
00:19:51 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
It's actually what would work, what would work to that target audience in the way they think and they feel.
00:19:57 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that's super important to how we work and how we craft our operations.
00:20:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating.
00:20:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating.
00:20:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, I mean, I mean, everyone's talking about AI at the moment and I realise we probably couldn't make a podcast without talking about AI at some point.
00:20:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I'll pose this question about it.
00:20:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So your website talks about trade craft.
00:20:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How is your human expertise
00:20:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
the competitive advantage when you've got AI in that space, which obviously can think faster than we can, it can act faster than us with agentic AI.
00:20:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Where does the human stay in the loop for this kind of...
00:20:30 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yeah, so it's a really strong theme in what GoShift is and what we're developing is the AI question.
00:20:39 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so yeah, in the here and now,
00:20:42 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Our capability is centered around specialist professional services using that expertise I talked about through cyber domain plus linguistic and cultural expertise plus operational tradecraft that allows us to remain covert and do things that the adversary can't detect or see.
00:20:58 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And at the moment, you can't teach a machine to do those things, and especially things that need to take place in the real world to enable these kind of covert capabilities as well.
00:21:11 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so
00:21:12 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
a part of what we offer is, about this kind of curated, tradecraft-led ability to build covert personas, access platforms and influence in a way that a machine can't do currently because machines think in patterns and think at scale.
00:21:29 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that's the kind of juxtaposition we're in at present and why our offer is extremely relevant.
00:21:39 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And
00:21:42 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
What we're building is the evolution of that.
00:21:45 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So it's actually taking AI technology and looking at ways in which we can scale our operations through that, both through the orchestration of what we do at scale, but also through how we deliver that kind of curated content, that specialist tradecraft to more and more target audience at scale.
00:22:06 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Because going back to my original point,
00:22:09 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
the threat landscape is increasing exponentially.
00:22:12 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
It's led by humans behind machines.
00:22:14 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Those humans are using AI to generate content and personas and their own platforms at scale, but they're churning out content at pace that is machine-led rather than human-led in its reach and resonance.
00:22:28 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so what we're seeking to do is take a tradecraft approach, but scale that through AI.
00:22:35 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
and machine orchestration so that we have a really powerful scalpel-like capability that we can deploy at 10x, 20x going forward.
00:22:45 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And we think that will be a differentiator going forward to be able to offer that kind of unique expertise, but in a way that competes and undermines the machine-led operations of adversaries globally.
00:23:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I realise this is probably one of those questions we could easily go do a deep dive on, comparing AI to humans as well.
00:23:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, we have the same kind of thing in terms of kind of like, working with defence companies and adding that kind of like human decision making element over the top of kind of like an AI layer, but it's still human led and not, you know, not human on the loop, so to speak.
00:23:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I realise, I realise
00:23:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So kind of information is a decisive resource in modern conflict.
00:23:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, we've obviously seen the US-Iran conflict across the Middle East over the last few months.
00:23:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We've seen times where AI has been put to use very quickly.
00:23:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's rightly and wrongly.
00:23:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's certainly had an effect in shaping kind of the outcome, I guess.
00:23:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
in your view, kind of what separates that useful information versus from just having more data, as in, I realise that there's a very well understood kind of model out there in terms of turning data into actionable, usable information.
00:24:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Just kind of wanted to get your perspective on it.
00:24:14 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space.
00:24:17 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And, you know, data
00:24:20 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Data is definitely still king in terms of, the more data you can acquire to give you a, as much rounded picture as possible and then make decisions at pace on that data.
00:24:35 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I think, the more capable, the more effective, the more lethal or the more strategic impact you will have, especially when you bring kind of, AI-led data science
00:24:50 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
and use of big data into that mix as well.
00:24:53 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I think at the moment there is still a space for specialist insights within that data and data that you can't get.
00:25:07 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Sorry, not data, you can't get insights you can't get from an approach that is very much data-led.
00:25:13 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so, you know, in the space that we operate in, we have competitors who
00:25:17 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
acquire data at scale and provide insights on that data-led picture about what's going on in the information environment.
00:25:25 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that does give some really useful insights as to what a temperature check is for any conversation or issue globally.
00:25:35 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
What that doesn't give you is what might be being said in a closed space about a particular issue that might then be seeded there
00:25:46 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
go elsewhere, be amplified and lead to a bigger threat.
00:25:50 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so there's plenty of examples of this occurring, but one example from the commercial world is threats to executives in response to changes to things like gaming platforms.
00:26:02 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so I won't call out a particular platform, but one of the big issues that happened a year or two ago was that there was a change to a big platform and the people that it impacted were everyday gamers
00:26:16 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
who didn't like the changes, mostly related to cost and service provision.
00:26:21 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And this has to make death threats in closed spaces on Discord, which is very much a closed space platform.
00:26:30 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And they eventually were amplified out and became a proper threat against executives of a substantial corporation.
00:26:39 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And I think that's the difference.
00:26:41 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
That kind of access, understanding of what
00:26:44 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
of what Tom is saying to Chris and how they both feel about it.
00:26:48 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And actually, we've been speaking to Chris for a year and we know when he's up, we know when he's down, we know he's angry, we know when he's posturing or when he's trying to like, you know, play a role or the big man and when he's actually going to do something about it.
00:27:04 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that particular kind of insight that is very much still only accessible through
00:27:12 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
human interaction rather than a data-led approach is still really relevant.
00:27:18 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that's why we offer what we offer in GoShift in terms of that unique persona-based access, because we still think that trying to understand over a period of time what humans are doing in closed spaces and how they talk to each other rather than how they maybe broadcast at a wider scale or what they put out in public is still a hugely valuable insight.
00:27:38 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And when you add that to a big data approach,
00:27:42 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
you can really understand what's going on, what's happening or what's about to happen.
00:27:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So we're always interested to hear from organisations that want to contribute their thoughts to our articles.
00:27:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If this is you, send it to the e-mail newsletter to stay up to date on what we're working on.
00:27:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
There's a link in the show notes.
00:27:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Otherwise, back to the episode.
00:28:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, got it.
00:28:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
made a lot more sense in that last that last kind of explanation you gave.
00:28:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I had, I think I really got it then, because I can imagine if you're obviously planning kind of offensive operation, whether that's kind of a terrorism related or, kind of like state actors on, against another state, for example, you might need to
00:28:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
manufacture defence capabilities at scale, faster, move things around, almost like the kind of like I think of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, where we saw the big build-up of forces on the Belarusian border, for example, and obviously the satellites were picking this up over a number of months, and it was, Russia was saying, No, we're definitely not going to do anything, no, we're definitely not going to do anything, you know, and obviously looking back now for four or five years later, and it's like, Well, clearly there was a big there was a big indicator that something
00:28:55 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
was going to happen.
00:28:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Obviously, if you can make a timely decision with information a lot earlier and understand, and I think you mentioned it kind of like the temperature of the room, if you can capture the temperature of the room much faster than anyone else, and not only is a good commercial advantage for it, for say
00:29:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
manufacturing X many more tomahawks or buying many more tomahawks at an earlier stage versus investing that into, kind of other defence capabilities.
00:29:28 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And obviously you've got a, you're more efficient as a national entity, but also companies can act more leanly, more decisively and waste less money on what ifs.
00:29:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
contingency plans and stuff.
00:29:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I think I've got I've got I really got it in that last answer.
00:29:47 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yeah, and I think that's the way to think about it is that, yeah, there's a certain perspective you get through, really technical intelligence capabilities and, increasingly through AI-led capabilities that, fuse multiple sources.
00:30:05 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
But what we offer is that, like I say, that
00:30:08 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
focus on humans and what humans are doing and saying, and ultimately how that those, what they do and what they say can be influenced and changed.
00:30:17 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that can have an impact, at a significant scale if done correctly.
00:30:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, got it, got it.
00:30:22 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Okay, we're jumping on to the penultimate question anyway.
00:30:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
What do you see as the current problems and opportunities on working with NATO countries?
00:30:31 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yes, it's really interesting.
00:30:33 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So I think
00:30:37 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
The opportunities I'll do first, because I always like to start on a positive, is that, our experience, my experience working with native countries, both commercially and within government, have always been excellent, really positive.
00:30:53 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
The NATO's taken a lot of flack over the last few years, but it's still as a vehicle for cooperation and, you know, values-led.
00:31:05 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
defensive alliance work is still immensely powerful and regularly meet with partners and clients from across NATO nations who work together easily because we're all pretty much on the same page of what we're doing and what we're trying to stop.
00:31:22 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that always feels really positive and that actually there is a lot that can be done.
00:31:29 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I think the challenges that exist are
00:31:33 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
we touched on defence spending earlier.
00:31:35 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I think there is still a real lack of concrete coordination on how defence budgets collectively should be spent on collective capabilities as opposed to spending on particular capabilities in particular nations.
00:31:52 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And obviously, different nations feel different threats, like, you know, what people feel on the Russian border in the Baltics is different to what we feel
00:32:01 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
over in the UK, for instance.
00:32:05 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And I think that the NATO model for bringing new capability into the space and making sure that it lands with the right customer can be quite hard to break into.
00:32:21 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And I think that's certainly been our experiences in new businesses, knowing that we have something that's vitally important for the here and now and coming potential conflicts in the future.
00:32:31 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
wanting to kind of test that and get feedback from NATO countries who really need that capability, but finding it quite difficult to traverse the kind of different array of organisations and arrangements and bids within NATO to actually get in front of the right people and talk about what we can do and how we can build capabilities for them.
00:32:51 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And I'd like to see that improve because Europe really needs to
00:32:58 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
have a step change in how it delivers defence innovation and enabling capability to put in front of the right people quickly for immediate feedback to allow that innovation to continue at pace needs to improve and we feel that acutely.
00:33:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:33:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, I mean, I mean, obviously.
00:33:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Mr.
00:33:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Diana came online, what I think three years ago now, off the top of my head, in order to kind of address that innovation gap or increase that diffusion across the spectrum of kind of countries.
00:33:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I think one thing you definitely brought out there is a disparity of the primary threats, obviously felt, you know, the Baltic countries are obviously digging, currently at the moment, digging, you know, kind of,
00:33:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
counter mobility traps along the border, across in the UK.
00:33:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We're obviously concerned with subsea cable sabotage and stuff, and so we've got that real problem because one problem for one country isn't necessarily the main problem for another country, so getting kind of the thing to agree and move as one piece is probably is incredibly hard.
00:34:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it's the NATO summit next week in Ankara, so we'll be following that really closely to see what the
00:34:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
what the mood is like, particularly as the US administration has kind of exerted pressure onto the NATO model to say, look, we need to, this needs to be more equally balanced, but not from a spending perspective and also kind of people, our countries doing, pulling their weight for NATO.
00:34:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So yeah, we'll be looking at that one closely.
00:34:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I realise, I realise obviously
00:34:35 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Time is getting away from this afternoon, so I'll jump on to the final question.
00:34:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
What does the future look like for GoShift?
00:34:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, it's a really great question.
00:34:47 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Yeah, it's a great question.
00:34:50 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
It's just interesting to try and sometimes try and pull yourself out of the here and now of dead-to-day business delivery and push towards the future.
00:34:58 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
But it's, I mean, at the same time, it's always there in your mind.
00:35:01 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So yeah, we're really ambitious.
00:35:03 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And we know that we are operating in a space that is going to become more and more relevant and more and more impactful, unfortunately, on day-to-day life for UK, Five Eyes, NATO, and all of our partners globally.
00:35:18 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that it will not only impact national security and defence, but also commercial entities, NGOs, a whole host of sectors that come under various forms of misinformation, disinformation,
00:35:32 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
and wider information attack.
00:35:33 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And I touched on gaming as one example, but you talk about extraction industries, finance, you talked about cyber crime.
00:35:40 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
The list is pretty much endless.
00:35:42 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And we see the need for our capability in all those spaces.
00:35:49 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And so we want to grow to work into primarily in national security and defence at present, but grow out into those other sectors, particularly where, as you talk about cyber crime threat, there are actors who are
00:35:59 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
do things like actively trying to recruit insider threat to employees from big companies such as Vodafone and Telefonica and all these other places like that is ongoing in the here and now and there doesn't appear to be much to be done to disrupt or stop it.
00:36:15 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So those kind of space we see as being in exceptional need of our kind of capability.
00:36:23 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I talked about AI and the use of technology to help scale
00:36:29 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
our human expertise, and that is fundamentally where we're going.
00:36:32 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
We're building a technology that will take best-in-class tradecraft from the intelligence community and turn that into a scalable platform for deployment to counter information-based threats, whether that be in defense or commercially.
00:36:48 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And that's what we're building.
00:36:49 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
So we're currently going through the cycle of innovating
00:36:53 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
We've got some UKRI grant funding to help us do some testing around AI models on that.
00:36:59 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And over the next year, we'll be deploying more capital to help us scale and grow the early parts of this technology.
00:37:08 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
What we're aiming to be is the primary deliverer of information dominance to our clients, whether it be a national coast of defence, commercially, or any other government or NGO related sector.
00:37:23 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And
00:37:23 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Where there is information threat, we want to be able to help counter that threat and provide a degree of resilience and unique capability to help solve those challenges for our clients.
00:37:35 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And yeah, we want to be a strong part of a growing UK innovation and dual use economy going forwards.
00:37:45 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
I think we're really passionate about that.
00:37:48 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
And we want to be a strong part of helping the UK grow and add
00:37:52 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
next-gen capability through the use of AI to our economy and help the UK really grow into this space as well.
00:38:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, brilliant stuff.
00:38:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You mentioned a few things there I just wanted to kind of like comment on because I can see a real need for, so you mentioned about kind of information dominance against employees with defence companies, for example, and that gap in defence
00:38:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
problem is something we've covered on a few podcasts in the past where actually is that if you've got a defence scale up, for example, that is looking to expand size or internationally is that they've got to ensure their information security is incredibly tight to prevent that kind of that data dumps that the bad actors are doing, especially with European companies and obviously GDPR regulations, they're very, you know, they're very
00:38:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
very strict in the EU countries.
00:38:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I can understand that kind of improving the resilience of defence companies is a huge strategic win and big challenge obviously for them and obviously you guys helping them out.
00:38:55 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But yeah, I'm just going to say in the end, thank you very much for giving up some time and kind of sharing more about what GoShift is, does and the direction it's going and the problems you guys solve.
00:39:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'll leave you guys to the rest of your afternoon and yeah, look forward to hearing from you soon.
00:39:11 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Thanks, Chris.
00:39:12 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Absolute pleasure.
00:39:13 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Thanks for having me on and it's been great to chat.
00:39:14 Tom Sefton Collins, former GCHQ operational leader turned founder of GhostShift, a British defence technology company helping governments and industry achieve information dominance.
Enjoyed it?
00:39:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's really great talking with Tom and hearing his fascinating journey.
00:39:19 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If you want to find out more about GoShift, check out the show notes below and we'll see you next time.
