The workshop on retaliation organised by Professor Marianna Fotaki and Professor Iain Munro began with GCHQ whistleblower and anti-war activist Katharine Gun's opening speech.

Gun's experience as a whistleblower has been adapted to an acclaimed Hollywood movie, Official Secrets, starring Keira Knightley and Matt Smith in 2019. She writes: "Sixteen years ago, I became headline news after I leaked an internal email from GCHQ, the communications intelligence gathering centre near Cheltenham... I admitted the leak and my life was turned upside down. Yet to this day there has been barely a mention of the Bush regime’s disgraceful demand in official histories of the period, as if it’s been deliberately written out."

To hear Gun's own account of events, watch the video from our workshop: