Why Bletchley Park could never happen today

Fuck all you

Can I vote for a party that accepts up to, say, 7,000 deaths per annum as acceptable collateral damage to be the freest and most liberal (classical sense) country in the world where my government looks after big stuff and has a priority of protecting my freedom rather than my life?

existential national threat?

So John-Paul Sartre's followers have turned nasty?

I suspect

theres a simple reason why the people involved in 'ultra' never leaked anything.

Its because they knew if they leaked it to our press, the government would D-notice the press and throw the leaker in jail, and if the leaker gave stuff to the germans , the leaker would be taken for a short dangle from a piece of rope in Pentonville jail....

This is just Crypto 101

Isn't this the principle on which crypto software is designed -- keep the minimum amount of information actually secret? Secure crypto software can have the Source Code and encrypting keys published, because the only secret is the naked decrypting key -- it's even safe to send out documents encrypted using it; and if the matching encrypting key (which is known to everyone) decrypts a document, you can be sure that it was sent by someone who has that key. Which, if it's the only thing that need be kept secret, is easier to keep secret than a whole bunch of other stuff. (Even sent messages cease to be secret, once the event referred to has already happened.)

So, keeping the minimum possible amount secret -- and that must include not collecting data unnecessarily in the first place -- seems to be a reasonable principle to apply.

Milo Minderbinder

Milo Minderbinder is behind all of this.

As the Italians say, Cui Bono

Ms May and her colleagues have been sold a pup. And they won't admit it. And we will carry on paying billions for espionage on ourselves that generates no advantage.

FISA

"The problem is that those charged with exercising those checks have failed to exercise due care, and what we see is an outcome of "regulatory capture". "

To a great extent, yes. Although, apparently the FISA court *did* stop rubber stamping, and straight-up tell the NSA they did not approve of their later plans. The NSA had one of their lawyers come up with a fairly non-sensical argument justifying their actions, and just kept doing them (they did not take up their counterarguments with FISA, just kept going). At this point, their actions were undeniably illegal, since they were collecting information without the required approval of FISA. They just assumed nobody would leak their illegal activities.

Anyway, I agree with the article -- contractors are not guaranteed steady work, so they don't have that "work for life" kind of loyalty. There's not a clear enemy like the Nazis to unify people. I think leaking info is easier now; if the main stream media is just going to sit on something, it can be released publicly online instead. And finally, the NSA has been a bad actor, not following the minimal legal restrictions placed on them and then lying about it... I think if they had been better behaved, Snowden would not have had the fit of conscience to leak this information, and there would not have been interesting information to leak anyway.

Ahem

.....Since 1989, the threats to the countries of the free world have been from terrorists who certainly wish to commit mass murder, but do not pose an existential national threat......

There are certainly sufficient grounds to suspect that a certain "religion of peace" would like to do sufficient damage to the infidel masses to create an existential threat to those infidel masses.

Bletchley Park relied on total, long-term secrecy over its methods. If the Nazi regime had realised that the Allies were breaking its "unbreakable" Enigma machines on a routine basis, the game would have been up. But that secret was kept for the entire war and for three decades beyond.

I think one of the reasons why it was kept secret for decades after the war was that the UK was recommending/selling Enigma machines to various commonwealth countries as being "the unbreakable code machine we never cracked" which allowed the UK to access their secure messages. Perhaps the reason why it was kept secret for so long was that then people felt a sense of duty to the country and if they were told it was a state secret then they didn't talk about it. However, now everything has been reduced to the individual so if someone (e.g. Snowden. Manning etc) thinks they should tell other people then that's what they do.

I don't care

I really don't care that states spy on each other and try to tap into other countries communications. I think that's just the real world, and is a requirement in keeping a nation secure.

What worries me is when these abililities filter down to local law enforcement agencies. I should be able to communicate and store infromation without worrying about big brother government spying on my for whatever reason tickles their political or financial fancy on a day to day basis. That's what is worrying - that recent terrorist incidents seem to have bred a "right" and desire for government to spy on their own constituents.