On Monday, June 30, 2014 4:33 PM, doug
<douglasrankine2001@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Shaun,
Have you ever heard of Vula? it was the secret communications system
used by the African National Congress to communicate between the
various groupings of its leadership, in South Africa and abroad, and
was carried out under the very noses of the South African Aparthied
and UK authorities.
i believe the story of its development can be found on the ANC website
in its archives, but I haven't been able to find it, and it may be on
cryptome, though I discovered the following url:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/37a/043.html
which gives a fair resume of the use of encryption and the security
practices which its operatives used to keep prying eyes away from
their data. It's development was very much a hit and miss project, and
done on a shoestring. I have often wondered how much the authorities
knew about it at the time...
According to Mandela's lawyer, Mandela used his personal prison
officers to pass on information to the rest of the ANC leadership.
Apparently, the prison officer worked for the secret service, B.O.S.S.
and passed on information from Mandela to his superiors. It took
Mandela many years to develop these relationships and to be able to
trust his prison officer. the problem was that if the messages given
to the prison officer didn't get through, because the employer,
B.O.S.S. didn't pass on the messages to the various conduits of the
ANC then Mandela would have known about it and found out that the
officer was a plant. It was one of those funny contradictions of
history, that one of the most secretive and hated security services in
the world, actually passed on "secret" messages from Mandela to his
cohorts...funny eh...
Eventually, the head of B.O.S.S. began to smell a rat and asked how it
was thought up and Mandela apparently replied that he had more time to
think about it...
ATB
Dougie.
On 28/06/14 21:50, Shaun O'Connor wrote:
@Douggie the opening 4 notes of Beethoven 5th symphony correspond to
the Morse code sequence dit dit dit daah as you rightly pointed out,,
that translates to the letter v (v for victory)
On 28/06/2014 16:30, Neal Lamb wrote:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
On Saturday, June 28, 2014 5:23 AM, doug
<douglasrankine2001@xxxxxxxxxxx>
<mailto:douglasrankine2001@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Shaun,
Glad you raised that. One of the problems I have in life is about
the meaning of words and concepts and the older I get the more
abstruse do the meanings become...to the point of illusion...or is it
elusion...When I was young I knew the meaning of everything and the
answer to everything...at least that is what me dad used to say. Now
that I am older I have reached the stage of where I mistrust
everything, but without quite accepting everything...to paraphrase
Oscar Wilde.
Such thoughts of mine apply to the words democracy, impartiality,
independence and concepts of such ilk. Not that I am the only person
to suffer from such a thing. One hears those words bandied about
every day like they have some kind of precise and universal meaning,
like sliced bread; when in fact the very opposite is true.
For instance, one could raise the question...in the wartime of World
War 2 the BBC was the only link that some countries had with
information which was different from that of the Nazi Propoganda
machine. In fact the BBC did even more than that, it was used as a
channel of information by the government to inform and guide
liberation movements and struggles in occupied territories. It also
fulfilled the role of keeping the British speaking peoples informed,
in a positive way, i.e. Dunkirk...of how the war was coming along,
and how to make spam, an American food import, which is rather
ubiquitous today. It used music from Beethoven's 5th Symphony for
instance, one of his dreariest in my view...I can never remember the
meaning of the words, though da da di da, I think it was in Morse
Code and Chanson d'autoumne was used by Radio Londres as the French
called it, for briefing la Resistance. This use made by the
government of the BBC facilities is, of course to be expected...if
not welcome...in wartime.
see url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Londres
for an intro to the subject. And it shows the close links which there
are between government and a nation's communication systems. When
married to the London Clubs of the time, that little phrase, "It just
won't do, old chap" was very effective in the world of censoring
words or actions.
Of course no one can broadcast television or radio, even amateurs, in
our society without having some kind of licence or being
registered...that is not just about keeping tabs on people or
organisations, or censoring content, but necessary for helping to
ensure that electrical interference doesn't stop people from watching
the BBC...;-) . This is of course, called dual or multi-purpose use,
like exporting munitions from the United States, once even included
cryptographic software. Nowadays it is allowed, if only because
governments export so much of it. Of course such attempts are never
absolute, as there are many local radio stations which operate around
the country, illegally, providing copyrighted material for free to
our young people, great nashings of teeth of the copyright industry.
Much as in the same way the UK's first nuclear plant for power
generation at Sellafield which was opened by our Queen in a much
vaunted publicity stunt in the 1950's actually had the dual purpose
of providing plutonium for our nuclear bomb making industry. How I,
as a child, marvelled at the idea at the time, almost free and
unlimited power for the nation. I first read about it in the National
Geographic magazine, whilst I was at the dentist with toothache. I
become so absorbed in it, that it removed the pain. What would we do
without Sellafield today...all those nuclear fish and large storage
tanks leaking chemicals into the soil and Irish sea. Millions has
been spent on trying to clean it up, and they can't agree on where to
store it. Still, we have renamed the place...that should help solve
the problem.
I have a funny feeling that those words, democracy, independence and
impartiality have all sorts of meaning to all sorts of people and
organisations and depend so much on context too, that they are
meaningless, certainly to me. It's a bit like science being objective
really, when I think science has much more to do with faith...
ATB
Dougie.
P.S. Now, would you care to tell me what you mean by the phrase that
"*_PRIVACY IS A BASIC RIGHT - NOT A CONCESSION"
_*
Not that I disagree with your sentiments, you understand...:-\
On 28/06/14 00:20, Shaun O'Connor wrote:
well that information Frankly does not surprise me one iota. oh and
on the question of the BBC being impartial. I question whether they
even know what the word means.
and obviously they serve the governments hidden(?) agenda beautifully
because there have I think been a number of occasions whereby if
everything was played directly by the book the BBC should have been
stripped of its charter.
<<snip>>
"*_PRIVACY IS A BASIC RIGHT - NOT A CONCESSION"_*
--
*_PRIVACY IS A BASIC RIGHT - NOT A CONCESSION _*
