big society

August 22, 2010 in generic disgust

A4E and Miss £5 Million will get you a job….pretending to get other people jobs. I love it when a plan comes together.

libertarian blogging fratricide

August 22, 2010 in mastur/metablogging

An unusual case. (Horrible right-wing) Blogger convicted of threatening to kill three judges. One judge is himself a (not all that horrible) right-wing blogger, and another is a horrible right-wing blogger and journalist’s brother. The prosecutor in the case is the former idol of Firedoglake, Patrick Fitzgerald.

cutting down on your mercenary miles

August 22, 2010 in 4GW, Afghanistan, corruption, cultures of war, Iraq, mercenary

Here’s something interesting. We must also consider the alternative that many of the most prominent and powerful Afghans are in fact motivated by greed and opportunism. [harrowell: ya think?] It is therefore in their interest to maintain the status quo of massive US and international spending that fuels the Afghan “rentier state” economy. This isn’t [...]

GCHQ Review, Part 5 – The Future and some Current Relevance

August 22, 2010 in electronics, GSM, hacker, intelligence and stupidity, networks

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 [...]

GCHQ Review, Part 4 – History and the overseas outposts

August 22, 2010 in history, intelligence and stupidity, moral horror

A 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 [...]

GCHQ Review, Part 3 – FISH, a case study

August 22, 2010 in can you believe we don't have a "science" tag?, class, computer, hacker, history, intelligence and stupidity, networks, special relationships, spy

So 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 [...]

news

August 22, 2010 in Viktor

Well, here‘s a piece of news. Al-Jazeera seems to think the Russians are hoping to exchange him.

GCHQ Review, Part 2 – GCHQ and the Tech Industry

August 14, 2010 in history, intelligence and stupidity, Internet

OK, 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 [...]

GCHQ Review: Part 1, The World’s Most Classified Blog and Other Stories

August 12, 2010 in intelligence and stupidity, Internet, networks, special relationships, spy, surveillance

So, 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 [...]

scraping the barrel

August 8, 2010 in diplomacy, hacker, Israel

I’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 [...]