Spycatcher's Relevance in 2014


In 1987 MI5's former Assistant Director, Peter Wright, released his autobiography. Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. It was immediately banned by the British Government. Although the Internet wasn't around to facilitate its distribution, it was trivial to obtain copies imported from Australia. As a boy, I remember seeing the publicity about it on the news and being very upset that my parents had a copy! In light of the recent revelations by Edward…

Continue reading →

Cryptography and the Coventry Problem


Photo of an Enigma machine at Bletchley Park.

There's an ethical conundrum which is often posed to military strategists and philosophers alike. In 1940, the Nazi's communications encryption had been broken by the British. Military Intelligence were able to decrypt a signal which indicated that the city of Coventry was to be bombed. The military chiefs took this information to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. If he ordered the evacuation of the city, he would save hundreds of thousands of lives - but the enemy would know that their …

Continue reading →

Is Samsung Spying on your Printer?


A padlock engraved into a circuit board.

Compare and contrast... [The] Xerox 914 copy machine [...] was used in soviet embassies all over the world. The machine was so complex that the CIA used a tiny camera designed by Zoppoth to capture documents copied on the machine by the soviets and retrieved them using a "Xerox repairman" right under the eyes of soviet security. Xerox Helped Win The Cold War And Samsung printers (as well as some Dell printers manufactured by Samsung) contain a hardcoded SNMP full read-write community…

Continue reading →