intelligence and stupidity

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…

Read More GCHQ Review, Part 2 – GCHQ and the Tech Industry

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

I’ve finally got around to reading Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban and Descent into Chaos. They are as good as everyone says. Specifically, there are perhaps three things that set Rashid apart as a writer on Central Asia. (His contacts book is outstanding, but then, he’s not the only one.) First of all, he writes about Central…

Read More writing about Afghanistan, rather than about Brunssum or Qatar

This has done the rounds and been roundly done for all the right reasons. There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists…

Read More Authoritarianism Does Its Thing

Something interesting about the NHS NPfIT project. During my recently completed two-week conference binge, I spoke to people from a British telecommunications company who were fresh, if that’s the word, from tangling with the NHS IT Zombie, and had apparently escaped before it ate their brains with a spoon. I also heard people from a…

Read More the problem with NPfIT is the “NP” bit

Quite ridiculous microtale about the head of MI6’s wife being on Facebook. But what’s this, from Patrick Mercer MP? The Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, who chairs the counter-terrorism sub-committee, said the mistake had left the Sawers family “extremely vulnerable”. Referring to Miliband’s suggestion that the incident was not significant, Mercer said: “If that is the…

Read More did you know Twitter stimulates Shatner’s bassoon?