Well, this looks pretty ugly. I have a question. We know that unofficial, non-doctrinal training material was being circulated around the joint services intelligence centre in Chicksands in 2003-2005 – there’s an interesting quote about it in the Guardian piece here: Any public inquiry into the activities of the JFIT would be expected to examine…
Read More I didn’t think I’d still be blogging this six years laterSo I scraped the government meetings data and rescraped it as one-edge-per-row. And then, obviously enough, I tidied it up in a spreadsheet and threw it at ManyEyes as a proof-of-concept. Unfortunately, IBM’s otherwise great web site is broken, so although it will preview the network diagram, it fails to actually publish it to the…
Read More Exactly what is Communication Strategy & Management Ltd?So I was moaning about the Government and the release of lists of meetings with external organisations. Well, what about some action? I’ve written a scraper that aggregates all the existing data and sticks it in a sinister database. At the moment, the Cabinet Office, DEFRA, and the Scottish Office have coughed up the files…
Read More so you want to know who’s lobbying?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 studySo, 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 StoriesThere are a few details of the latest of Germany’s synthetic-aperture radar imaging satellites at the German version of ScienceBlogs, on the occasion of the latest one being launched on a Russian Dnepr rocket. Tories should be delighted, it’s a PFI. Specifically, the German government contributes the bulk of the cost through its space agency,…
Read More at last, a PFI I actually supportThis looks interesting, although could they not have put together a much lower grade single PDF, or even an OCRd text? (I know this is a regular whine.)
Read More UKUSAI’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 QatarMeet the new project, everyone – reporting on our new Stable and Principled government, especially its unstable and unprincipled bits. I have just broken my duck. There’s also a twitter feed, facebook group, so on and so forth. It comes with Tom Boriswatch and Naadir Random!
Read More stable and principledWell, ha ha. But I do think we should note that David Cameron’s appointment as Prime Minister was greeted by the markets with a dramatic spike in the price of gold, not usually seen as a vote of confidence. Here’s the data, at Felix Salmon’s; as he points out, trying to map events in consensus…
Read More Flushing the cache