Many IMSI. So catching. Much aeroplane. Such Dirtbox. OK, so the US Department of Justice, or more directly, the FBI is flying around in light aircraft carrying an IMSI catcher in order to spy on the cellular traffic of evildoers and, hey, anybody else in the 37km max diameter of a GSM cell centred on…
Read More the British origins of #dirtboxAm I right in thinking that Moazzam Begg’s political role is getting more complicated, more important, and more impressive? Here’s a story. It kicks off with: British jihadi fighters desperate to return home from Syria and Iraq are being issued with death threats by the leadership of Islamic State (Isis), the Observer has learned. A…
Read More Moazzam Begg, always in the paper, rarely reported.Here’s an interesting story of a Russian military intelligence officer deployed into Ukraine, apparently under plausibly-deniable cover, whose communications were meant to hide in plain sight among the chaotic noise of the Internet. Specifically, he’s a gamer and re-enactor in private life and he tried to use the channels of this subculture. Unfortunately for him,…
Read More The problems of Puffin Party securityI’ve recently seen someone from the Satellite Applications Catapult come up on the UKNOF mailing list, asking about how best to get dark fibre from their Harwell offices into London with a view to distributing lots of satellite imagery. Obviously a CDN is the way to go, but the first thing that came to mind…
Read More Satellites to new heightsYou know I was saying about us being an emerging low-trust society an’all? Well. Well. Looky here. Via Jared Bernstein, the correlation between inequality and the demand for security guards. Look ma! There’s our kid next to Italy and Greece. And there’s something weird about Belgium, but everyone knows that.
Read More a data pointVideo from remote control helicopter shows the extent of flooding in Frankwell, #Shrewsbury. http://t.co/R8UUl6HtSx pic.twitter.com/FcqHL3qfYV — Shropshire Star (@ShropshireStar) February 10, 2014 OK, so the weird weather and infrastructure crisis exacerbated by the Galbraithian combination of private affluence and public squalor is being monitored by the local newspaper using a web platform for 140-character snarkfarts…
Read More ProliferationSir Humphrey says among much else, all worth reading: An outsider looking in may well conclude that the sort of military assets needed to build and effect long term change, stability and security are those which have effects such as training teams, defence attaches, limited professional training and so on with the nuclear deterrent as…
Read More Some Snowden consequencesThis Indy story is making some waves. The first point I’d draw from it is that the UK special relationship with the Gulf states is getting another go-round, and William Hague seems mad keen. As well as a lot of effort to sell stuff, and the town the size of Wigan or Oxford made up…
Read More Reading the newspaper, carefullyHere’s a really fascinating article in Inside GNSS about the proliferation of electronic countermeasures against GPS. The heaviest users are lorry drivers, who use GPS jammers to disrupt management surveillance of their working day. I would guess that this has probably benefited from an existing culture of radar detectors, GATSO databases, and such. This causes…
Read More GPS jamming for fun and profit, or at least workplace dignityJust a couple of points about the British wing of Snowden. First of all, what function does it serve to go begging to the Americans for sums of money that aren’t especially big in the context of a £1.8bn single intelligence budget? Well, the money is a costly-signal that UK cooperation is valuable to the…
Read More two points on Snowden in the UK