David Pepper

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

Pepper gained a doctorate in theoretical physics from St John's College, Oxford. He joined GCHQ in 1972, and worked in intelligence operations. In 1995 he became Director of Administration. In 1998, he transferred to the Home Office, returning to GCHQ in Cheltenham in 2000 as Director of Finance, and taking over the role of Director of GCHQ in April 2003 as successor to Sir Francis Richards. He was succeeded by Iain Lobban in July 2008. Following his retirement from GCHQ, Pepper became a non-executive director of Gloucestershire County Council.

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

It was under Pepper's tenure as GCHQ director that the Tempora data collection programme was instigated, with trials beginning at GCHQ Bude in Cornwall in 2008. Tempora extracts and processes data from international fiber optic cable communications. The former Liberal Democrat cabinet minister Chris Huhne described Pepper as a "bureaucratic stickler" and said that GCHQ would not have started the Tempora programme without the approval of government ministers. The Tempora programme was revealed in 2013 as part of the global surveillance disclosures by the former American National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

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