[cryptome] Re: D-Day & Encryption & Droning Along
- From: shelley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: cryptome@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 17:17:35 -0700
That was very well-put and you have made a number of good points. I
don't think the mass surveillance of our data is legal *or* right.
As you have mentioned Bletchley Park: It is 60 years ago today (still 7
June where I am) that we lost the great mind of Alan Turing, who was
instrumental in the cryptographic efforts of WWII. A damned shame,
given the circumstances.
On Sat, Jun 7, 2014, at 04:28 PM, doug wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
> D-Day, the 6th of June 1944 occurred a year before I was born. D-Day may
> be history, but its effect on all of our lives in the Western world is
> significant for a number of reasons. One was the intelligence skills
> that were used to inform a huge war machine which was built on the South
> Coast of England, in co-operation with the U.S. of A and member nations
> of the Commonwealth with a view to building a "second front" in Europe
> along the French coast, and attempting to keep that knowledge (of the
> date, time and landing points) from the Germans, through minimisation of
> the scale, through suppression subterfuge, and deliberate deception.
>
> As I was doing some D.I.Y. on my house today, overhead could be heard
> aeroplanes from the Second World War, disturbing my peace as I worked in
> the garden...There was an event here in Bognor Regis in the South of
> England, commemorating the event. The droning of those Spitfires
> looping the loop and Lancasters circling around; with their distinctive
> markings; in memory of that incredible event where almost 200,000 men,
> women were transported across the English Channel from the beaches and
> aerodromes of the South of England and all their equipment were landed
> on the beaches in Normandy in one day, and the subsequent building of
> the Mulberries at Arromanche could never have been achieved without
> those very intelligence and deception skills being utilised so
> expertly. This is not to undermine or deny the courage and the skills
> of those armed forces on the ground or in the air, or on the seas, who
> managed to land on those beaches. and take on an entrenched German army
> and defeat them at great cost. As Churchill said, "War is total".
> Secrecy and deception were all part of the game. If you were better at
> it than them then more of your "side's" lives and property would be
> saved.
>
> But, behind that great event, there was years of preparation. Without
> Bletchley Park and without the help and support of the US and the other
> allies, the Commonwealth and so on; the human cost would have been
> great, and the Second Front may have failed, perhaps leading to a Europe
> dominated by Stalin and the USSR who had defeated the Germans on the
> Eastern Front and were well on their way to liberating, or conquering
> Europe, depending on one's point of view. What a choice, goostepping
> and "Seig Heil" or goosestepping and love "Father Stalin".
>
> All before my time.
>
> A visit to Bletchley Park (now a museum) shows the role it played in
> the Second World War, not only in the submarine war and the cracking of
> the codes, but in the putting together of a new institution and
> providing the funding and expertise of the best mathematical brains in
> the UK and internationally, with the aim of collecting, analysing and
> using Axis communications to determine their present and future
> intentions. There was the famous 6 who were involved in the building of
> Collossus, the first electronic computer, which was a pathetic piece of
> equipment, full of unreliable components like valves and using huge
> amounts of energy and very slow, and with computing power which is
> almost laughable today. Yet, at the time it was the best that could be
> designed. Even with the introduction of the "bombes" from the US. and a
> staff of thousands, mainly women, it was still incredibly difficult to
> decrypt the higher German codes and those of the submarines. Human
> intellect was the main motive power though. Computers and bombes were
> for the number crunching, for discerning the patterns which
> cryptographers could use to get clues, cracks, or as they called them in
> those days, algorithms.. Cribs or the revealing of a letter, word or
> pattern through a mistake, were one of the main ways of getting into a
> code.
>
> Winston Churchill and the allies famously worked on the principle
> that anything which was discovered by the work at Bletchley, could not
> be used unless corroborating evidence, or alternative sources from
> elsewhere were found. That was what helped to allay the suspicions of
> those of the Axis powers who thought that their methods of encryption
> had been compromised. Such deception didn't work absolutely. Many
> mistakes were made and the German equivalents of Bletchley Park, managed
> to crack some of the codes used by the Allies, including the encrypted
> telephone line between Churchill and the U.S. President.
>
> Why am I mentioning this? Just to remind those of you who are young and
> may think otherwise, that intelligence gathering and its sister,
> deception, have gone on for a long time, ever since life occupied the
> planet and, in my humble opinion, will continue to do so for the
> foreseable future. Today, we are in a "war against terror". The
> difficulty I am having is finding out which ones are the terrorists, and
> which ones are the liberators. Just because the collection, monitoring
> and analysis of all the data in the internet of things may be lawful
> (which I doubt), doesn't mean to say that it is right. And, i have
> noticed over the years that those who work for the state, the higher up
> they go, the less motivation they have in representing the interests of
> their fellow citizens.
>
> Whilst I have been interested in encryption and codes and spying and
> such like since I was a child, and read lots of books on it, I have only
> ever used it once for a serious purpose, and that was to zip up a file
> in an email using winzip which contained a lot of personal and financial
> information referring to a house I was purchasing, which I didn't want
> to be contained in an "open" email. I have experimented with a number
> of encryption bits of software, but never really got on with them. Even
> the so called easy ones, I ballsed up, PGP I forgot my password and
> Truecrypt I also forgot the password and locked away 10 gigabytes of my
> hard disk and was never able to get it back. I dare say that my little
> bit of work lies in the files of the CIA and GCHQ awaiting decryption as
> I am informed that they always collect encrypted emails and such stuff.
> I don't mind, but I do hope that one day, when my computer crashes, I
> will be able to get on to the CIA or GCHQ and get a copy of all of my
> private and personal data. Now, that would be what I call a real
> customer service programme, getting a return on all that taxpayer money
> would be nice. After all, isn't that what the intelligence services are
> there for, to help us all, to protect us all from terrorism, to make us
> all safe and secure from the "bad" guys? In the meantime, I consider
> myself lucky, that i never really got into using encryption and that I
> never really trusted it. And the CIA and GCHQ have proved me
> right...packet technology might be efficient on the internet, but it is
> so easily manipulated. I feel sorry for all those liberation fighters
> and revolutionaries throughout the world who have been enticed to use
> the stuff, in the name of American or British freedom and human rights,
> only to find out too late, if ever, that the antidote software has been
> sold by some company or other to their home state, and to wonder why
> they have finished up in jail, or worse still been subject to rendition,
> or had drones with laser bombs dropped on their homes and their sons and
> daughters killed as collateral damage as part of a surgical strike .
> ATB
> Douglas Rankine.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Other related posts:
