"he threw away many thousands of hours of work"
A GCHQ intern who compromised national security by taking classified material home has been jailed for seven-and-a-half years.
Hasaan Arshad removed top secret files from a secure Government Communications Headquarters system and transferred them to his personal computer.
He pleaded guilty to an offence under the Computer Misuse Act.
Justice Maura McGowan said he caused “huge economic loss” and “damaged trust” when he used his phone to bypass strict protocols on August 24, 2022.
Arshad, a Manchester University computer science student, was nearing the end of a year-long placement at GCHQ’s Cheltenham site. He had worked on developing tools to track threats to the UK.
He had signed the Official Secrets Act and was told such data must only be accessed at “an extremely secure location.”
The court heard that part of the hearing was held in private due to national security concerns.
GCHQ works with MI5 and MI6 to collect intelligence from communications and disrupt threats from hostile states and terrorist actors.
Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC said: “This significant security breach compromised lawful intelligence-related activity that was being undertaken in the national interest.
“In doing so, he threw away many thousands of hours of work and significant sums of taxpayers’ money.
“The protection of the names of people who work for the intelligence services is critical for their safety.”
Arshad’s actions created a “significant risk” to national security and could have exposed 17 GCHQ staff. The material, classed as “top secret”, included codenames and details from other teams.
Mr Atkinson said: “There was no reason to take it home.”
He added that Arshad had committed a “flagrant breach” of his responsibilities and risked the data “falling into the wrong hands or being lost”.
Police also found 40 files of child abuse material on Arshad’s personal phone, including Category A images – the most serious classification.
He later admitted two charges of making indecent photographs of a child.
Speaking to police, Arshad said: “I would like to apologise for my actions. I removed the data simply out of curiosity.
“I’m sorry for my actions and I understand the stupidity of what I have done.”
Asked whether he had breached trust, he replied: “No comment.”
His lawyer, Nina Grahame KC, said he had been “reckless” and “thoughtless and naïve”.
She explained that Arshad had worked on a “specific project” and took the data home because he wanted to complete “the most exciting and challenging work the defendant had ever undertaken”.
He had hoped it would help him gain future employment at GCHQ.
Ms Grahame also told the court that Arshad had been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum and was “neuro-divergent”.
On the day of his arrest, he was due to begin his final year of university.
Justice McGowan said Arshad was “intellectually arrogant” and had acted as if “the rules did not apply to him”.
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