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 RelevanceSome data points relating to my last Sunday SDR post and specifically the points about the way in which some forms of advanced technology are becoming much more evenly distributed. Here’s Armscontrolwonk getting the wrong year, but more importantly, linking to India experimenting with hit-to-kill antiballistic missile/antisatellite technology. Here’s DARPA starting an app store for…
Read More Sunday SDR data pointsHere’s some more Iran sense. I especially like the bit where the Content is Free comments pit tries to explain to the Iranian all about Mohammed Mossadegh and all. that. jazz. Of course, he’s essentially reiterating the former head of the IRGC’s line. I’ve said before that the practicalities of this depend largely on what…
Read More who hid a radio under the stairs?The version of Nokia’s Share Online application that shipped with my E71 has a problem. I was trying to upload photos from Berlin over O2 Germany’s data network to my Flickr account, and it unexpectedly returned an authentication error; I looked at “your recent photos and videos”, and got photos belonging to Flickr user mrspin,…
Read More These are not my photos. I don’t know where you got themOK, so the Dubai assassination team made regular phone calls on GSM devices during the operation. What numbers did they call? From which ones? Well, it looks like they both used prepaid SIM cards acquired in Austria and they called Austrian telephone numbers. Obviously, that’s partly explained by the fact that they probably talked among…
Read More Abu Asterisk strikes again…Rather less depressing; Wired reports on the array of open-source IT tools for disaster relief getting their first use in earnest in Haiti. I remember when your main source for things like Google Earth overlays of aerial photos was Kathryn Cramer, and that was in the United States. However, there’s something I saw that wants…
Read More what these people need is…an updated frequency allocation tableOther people’s TDLs. I note that this year’s CCC has devoted some time to the wanktank phenomenon in Germany, and also elsewhere. Volker Bilk’s slides are here; it makes a lot of sense, but there’s quite a bit of German philosophical maundering in there, and I’d have liked to see more case studies/howtos. As far…
Read More CCC vs WanktanksAfter this post, I thought it might be useful to provide a visualisation of the data involved. I then realised I ought to do it rather better, so I collated the figures for all 47 names from the paper accounts into a spreadsheet and graphed them. This chart shows average monthly spending on mobile and…
Read More do you want me to draw a bloody diagram?Alex de Waal has an interesting post on the role of satellite phones, and specifically the Arabic and more importantly cheap Thurayas, in the wars of the Sahara today. He argues, in essence, that the capital requirements of being a warlord are coming down; if you don’t have a Toyota, you’re cannon fodder, if you…
Read More long distance information, give me Goma, DRCOver at James Nicoll’s blog: Cellphones don’t require landlines to be strung before they can be used and apparently people have been rather cunning about coming up with ways to use them to replace services they otherwise would not have access to: Some people carry just a card and borrow a phone when needed. Safaricom,…
Read More what M-PESA is not