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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 think most of my readers also read Patrick Lang’s blog, but I think this guest post is the best thing yet written on the Taliban/SIS/McChrystal/Petraeus fake sheikh affair. Really, there’s a great movie to be made here – the multiplicity of motives, the ironic contrast between the absurd story and the deadly serious interests…

Read More review of a movie that doesn’t exist yet

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…

Read More GCHQ Review, Part 3 – FISH, a case study

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…

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

An interesting document was turned up in the course of the row about John Brennan, the CIA officer who was the Obama team’s original choice as intelligence chief before he was dropped as being insufficiently opposed to torture, under a volley of criticism from the blogosphere. (“Opposition was mostly confined to liberal blogs,” said the…

Read More Is this the CIA? Is this the IRA? Is this the UDA? No, it’s the Grauniad…

Here’s an interesting question about the finally-released Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II report about the use of intelligence on Iraq. The “Shorter” for Phase II A is quite simply that “yes, it was all bollocks”, and specifically that it was all bollocks in the same way it was in the UK – caveats were removed,…

Read More selling the dummy