intelligence and stupidity

So we’re having a moment about John Boyd: The really interesting thing about the Dom Cummings appointment is that we now have someone in charge of No10 who is a devotee of Col. John Boyd, whose central thesis was to confuse your enemy and do the opposite of what they expect (1/4). — Damian McBride…

Read More Round and Round the OODA Loop: Folk Boyd and the Brexiters

Back at the end of 2007, as we dived into the trough of the Great Recession or Great Financial Crisis or Second Great Depression or what you will, a crucial decision was taken. Verizon Wireless, then still a Vodafone division, chose LTE for its new mobile network, and put one of the most important women…

Read More Ten Years of 4G: Trump, Snowden, Huawei, and Brexit

Randy McDonald, and probably others, seem to have found the Afzal Amin piece baffling, so I thought I’d draft a brief explainer as follows. Afzal Amin, potential Tory MP and ex-army officer, tried to incite the EDL to stage a provocative demonstration in his heavily Muslim constituency during the campaign, while also inciting a group…

Read More More questions on the Biryani Project.

I’ll be having more to say about the latest Snowdonian revelations as they apply to macro-politics, probably at the Fistful. In the meantime, the document at Le Monde is interesting from a technical point of view. They mention attacking a PBX – quite a common issue, because a lot of them are proprietary and not…

Read More The problem: the US can’t promise information security to anyone

So Andy Coulson, famously, was subject to a background check by Control Risks before joining Downing St. There was some doubt as to whether he had actually gone through the positive vetting process. Supposedly he had, and he was cleared to see “Strap 1” material. But then it turned out in fact the DVA hadn’t…

Read More We didn’t let Coulson see anything sensitive except for the SIGINT

I think it is probably important to direct attention to this post, which contains the only convincing explanation of PRISM I’ve yet seen, including the tiny budget (if it only cost $20m to process everything in Apple, Google, Facebook etc, what do they need all those data centres for), the overt denials, and the denial…

Read More PRISM. Sometimes it’s easier to solve these things in L

So, the Kenyan Police counter-terrorism spokesman has this to say: “Kenya’s government arrested Michael Olemendis Ndemolajo. We handed him to British security agents in Kenya and he seems to have found his way to London and mutated to Michael Adebolajo,” a Kenyan counter-terrorism spokesman, Muthui Kariuki, told the Associated Press. He added: “The Kenyan government…

Read More A very Blairite disaster

This Ha’aretz piece is interesting for the insight it gives into Israeli policy and especially into process, but also for a couple of other things. Notably, it’s remarkably frank about the Obama administration deliberately trying to stop Netanyahu going to war, and the role of dodgy casino guy Sheldon Adelson in both US and Israeli…

Read More Churchill was wrong for most of his career, you know…