A major philosophical difference between the UK and USA halves of the SIGINT tribe, and between the tribe and the military, was who the intended customer for intelligence was. The Americans were traditionally very keen on bringing everything back to Fort Meade for processing and analysis, and then feeding intelligence reports to the top level…
Read More GCHQ Review, Part 5 – The Future and some Current RelevanceA major claim of the recent group of “intelligence historians” is that the study of the secret world is the “missing element” in contemporary history – that, just as the history of the second world war needed revising after the British government finally let on about ULTRA, history (especially of the Cold War) is missing…
Read More GCHQ Review, Part 4 – History and the overseas outpostsSo we’ve discussed GCHQ and broad politics and GCHQ and technology. Now, what about a case study? Following a link from Richard Aldrich’s Warwick University homepage, here’s a nice article on FISH, the project to break the German high-grade cypher network codenamed TUNNY. You may not be surprised to know that key links in the…
Read More GCHQ Review, Part 3 – FISH, a case studyWell, here‘s a piece of news. Al-Jazeera seems to think the Russians are hoping to exchange him.
Read More newsOK, so some more on Aldrich’s GCHQ. Obviously, technology is at the centre of this story. I’ve said that the signals intelligence world is special among spooks because it guarantees results – they may not be the right results, they may not be helpful, but you can usually depend on it producing something to whack…
Read More GCHQ Review, Part 2 – GCHQ and the Tech IndustrySo, Richard Aldrich’s book on GCHQ. This looks like it’s going to be another in our occasional series of multi-part book reviews that nobody reads, as the book is nothing if not comprehensive. (It’s a mere Laundry-esque 666 pages in paperback.) Apart from being packed with good things, like paper and words, as Spike Milligan…
Read More GCHQ Review: Part 1, The World’s Most Classified Blog and Other StoriesI’ve finally got around to answering my own question here. The scraper is work in progress at the moment; the original pdf is rendered by pdftohtml into a tiresomely semi-structured (i.e. worse than no structure) tagpile. I was trying to tackle this through recursion, but I might either try using Python’s continue keyword or perhaps…
Read More scraping the barrelComing up on TYR this weekend – we review Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ…
Read More self-binding admin noticeExpanding on my comment here, I think the most illuminating way of looking at the debate about how big a society (ha!) needs to be to support certain levels of technology may be to look at some natural experiments. Specifically, we know about a number of cases where societies have decided to acquire complex new…
Read More learning a world of missilesOwen Hatherley has an immense post about Sheffield, modernism, socialism, privatisation, etc. Which reminded me of an estate agent ad I saw recently, for a gaff in the Highgate New Town estate. The sales-slug referred to a “3 double bedroom apartment in an architecturally-designed ex-local authority development, with 19′ kitchen/diner, 12′ reception, and exclusive access…
Read More architecturally designed