August 22, 2010

by 0 comments on "cutting down on your mercenary miles"

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…

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by 0 comments on "GCHQ Review, Part 5 – The Future and some Current Relevance"

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…

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by 0 comments on "GCHQ Review, Part 4 – History and the overseas outposts"

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…

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by 0 comments on "GCHQ Review, Part 3 – FISH, a case study"

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…

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