Intelligence claims

There have been a few passages from Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story Of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency that have struck me as especially worthy of discussion, so far.

Spying as a stabilizer

Discussing the 1960s, Aldrich argues that improved intelligence from signals intelligence (SIGINT) and satellite sources “made the international system more stable” and “contributed to a collective calming of nerves”:

Indeed, during the 1960s the penetration of the NATO registries by Eastern Bloc spies was so complete that the Warsaw Pact had no choice but to conclude that the intentions of Western countries were genuinely defensive and benign.

Previously, we discussed some of the major problems with spies. In this book, Aldrich brings up a partial counterpoint. Countries tend to consider secretly intercepted communications to be a highly credible source of information. If a country tells you it is planning to do Thing X for Reason Y, there are all sorts of reasons why they could be deceiving you. If you secretly overhear the same plan within their internal discussions, you have more reason to think that it will go forward and that the reasons behind it are genuine.

Revolutionaries and symbolic violence

Discussing the actions of the Turkish People’s Liberation Army (TPLA) and Turkish People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) during the 1970s, Aldrich says:

Both consisted of middle-class intellectuals who regarded themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Like many revolutionary leaders, they suffered from a ‘Che Guevara complex’, believing that symbolic acts of violence could trigger a wider social revolution. Che Guevara had come to grief in 1967 during a futile attempt to stir the revolutionary consciousness of Bolivia, and was captured and shot by a police team, advised by the CIA. Turkey’s would-be revolutionaries would soon suffer a similar fate.

The TPLA and TPLF figure into Aldrich’s story because of their targeting of intelligence facilities: initially accidentally, and later intentionally.

How far ahead are the spooks?

The codebreaking success of the Allies against the Germans and Japanese during the second world war was kept secret until the 1970s. Most of the documents about codebreaking being declassified now extend up to the 1970s. Because of such secrecy, it is impossible to know what technologies and capabilities organizations like America’s NSA, Britain’s CGHQ, and Canada’s CSE have today.

Describing the early 1970s, Aldrich explains how the microwave relays used by the telephone system beam signals into space accidentally, because of the curvature of the Earth. Forty years ago, the United States was already using satellites to intercept that spillover. Furthermore, they were already using computers to scan for keywords in phone, fax, and telex messages.

As early as 1969, the British and Americans had a system in place somewhat akin to what Google Alerts do today: tell it what keywords you are interested in, and it can pull related content out from the torrent of daily traffic. You can’t help but wonder what they are able to do now: whether the increased volume of communication has overwhelmed their capability to do such filtering effectively, or whether advances in secret techniques and technologies mean that they have even more potent methods for intercepting and processing the world’s commercial, diplomatic, and interpersonal communication.

Penetrating the secrecy

Aldrich also describes the investigative journalism of people like Duncan Campbell and James Bamford – people who used open sources to reveal the true function of GCHQ for the first time. Aldrich claims that their actions “confirmed a fundamental truth: that there are no secrets, only lazy researchers”.

Some recent journalistic undertakings – such as the excellent ‘Top Secret America’ – do lend credence to that view.

Spying between friends

Richard Alrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency describes a number of instances of longstanding allies conducting espionage against one another, including signals intelligence (SIGINT). Aldrich describes how the ‘Echelon’ system run by British and U.S. intelligence was used to “read the traffic of their minor allies, including France and West Germany”. This system is now estimated to process five billion intercepts per day, probably filtering them for suspicious words and phrases. Aldrich talks about how, after the second world war, Britain’s codebreakers were “doing extensive work on Britain’s European allies, regarding them as either insecure or untrustworthy, or both”.

Of course, more awkward allies have been a higher priority for codebreaking and other forms of covert activity. During the interwar period, Russian ciphers were the the “core business” of Britain’s codebreakers, and apparently work on them didn’t stop despite their subsequent alliance. The Soviets were also spying on the allies, though with more of an emphasis on human intelligence (HUMINT). For example, John Cairncross worked at GCHQ’s predecessor – Bletchley Park – and warned the KGB of the impending German armoured offensive at Kursk, one of the decisive battles of the war. He also saw some of Britain’s early thinking on atomic weapons while working at the Cabinet Office, while his fellow Russian spy Klaus Fuchs was virtually able to provide the blueprints of the devices built at Los Alamos. The Soviet Union achieved other notable HUMINT successes throughout the Cold War, such as the John Walker espionage within the navy. Surely, there are other examples that are still secret.

Allied SIGINT against Soviet targets continued after 1945, as GCHQ and others started to intercept messages between Moscow and the capitals of new client states.

The most subtle reference to inter-allied spying comes from a passage on the Diplomatic Wireless Service, developed in 1944 and 1945. Aldrich describes how the DWS was primarily a system of military SIGINT collection stations, but that it also “doubled as a secret monitoring service working from within British Embassies and High Commissions”. High Commissions are only located in Commonwealth countries, on whom Britain is presumably still spying. They seem to be returning the favour, as demonstrated by another anecdote from the book, in which Prime Minister Tony Blair discovered his hotel room in India to be laced with listening devices that would have had to be drilled out of the walls to disable.

Abusing the word ‘green’

I have written before about how the word ‘sustainable’ is frequently abused. People often refer to anything done with the slightest bit of environmental awareness as ‘sustainable’. Thus, it is ‘sustainable’ to bring your own mug to Starbucks or turn off the lights when you leave the room. In reality, a sustainable process or situation is one that can be carried on indefinitely. Sustainable electricity generation must be based on renewable sources of energy, and sustainable agriculture must have no non-renewable inputs.

If anything, the word ‘green’ is even more abused than the word ‘sustainable’. The U.S. Air Force claims that its synthetic jet fuel is ‘green’ even though it is made with fossil fuels. Any time there is a marginal improvement in a dirty process, it is heralded as a ‘green’ accomplishment.

None of this is to say that small improvements don’t matter. The global energy system needs to be reformed from the ground up, in big ways as well as small. What I am arguing is that we should not allow the definition of words like ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ to be diluted to the point where they are just public relations tools. A green initiative or innovation is one that contributes meaningfully to the kind of sustainable world we need to build. It is not just something that can be marketed to those who find it chic to care about the environment.

Your Money: The Missing Manual

J.D. Roth’s Your Money: The Missing Manual is a sensible and accessible guide to personal finance. It covers the psychology of money and happiness, goal-setting, budgeting, managing debt, frugality, banking, credit, taxes, investing, and more. While at least some of the contents are likely to be familiar to any reader, before the pick up the book, I found it valuable as a kind of checklist. It helped to identify areas in which I didn’t know as much as I should, and helped me come up with a half-dozen financial tasks I should undertake.

The book places particular emphasis on the importance of cashflow: getting into a situation where income each month is serving sufficiently to cover basic needs, work toward reducing debt, set resources aside for emergencies, and advance long-term financial plans like home ownership and retirement. The book isn’t shy about giving advice. For instance, it expresses the view that actively managed mutual funds are an exploitative industry from the perspective of investors, and endorsing regular contributions to index funds as the best long-term investment strategy.

Two flaws with the book, from my perspective, were an inconsistent level of detail and a U.S. focus. I cannot legitimately complain about the latter, since that is the target audience. Still, Canadians should know that some of the content on insurance, retirement, and taxes is not appropriate to them.

One nice little thing about the book is that it is printed on unusually good paper, with a pleasantly robust cover for a paperback. The author points out how getting value for money doesn’t mean going for the cheapest option, but rather for the one that serves your needs best relative to its price. The book’s philosophy is reflected in its construction.

Sharpie pens

I am particular about my pens. I want them to work reliably, produce nice looking text, and not bleed through pages. For several years, I used Pilot’s excellent line of G2 pens. Unfortunately, these have become harder and harder to find. In fact, they seem to have been displaced by imitators that resemble them, such as the Zebra Sarasa.

I have been reduced to stocking up on G2s when visiting friends and family in the United States (especially the green and red models, which seem to be totally unavailable in Canada). When visiting Vermont a few months ago, I cleaned out a Staples location of their entire stock of four-colour packages of G2s. I only really needed the green ones (for taking notes in books and magazines), but they are only available along with the rest.

Given that awkwardness, I decided to take Emily’s suggestion and try the new Sharpie pens. I have been using the blue and black models for a couple of weeks and am generally very happy with them. They have fine points and ink that dries quickly. They don’t bleed through even thin Moleskine pages, and seem to write well on a variety of surfaces. The only downside I have discovered is that the ink from the blue model looks rather thin and translucent compared with the Pilot G2 blue.

In any event, it’s worth spending $4 to give a couple of Sharpie pens a try.

Soda and food stamps

William Saletan has written a very odd article for Slate, responding to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to make soda ineligable for purchase with food stamps. I think he intends to argue against the plan, but all his piece does is list the arguments in favour of it.

He points out the severity of America’s problem with obesity, as well as the argument that it is more justifiable to restrict how consumers can use food stamps than it is to restrict what they can do with their own money. He cites Robert Doar’s argument that “[g]overnment should not be in the business of subsidizing poor health habits that end up costing taxpayers through higher Medicaid and Medicare costs” and makes reference to how soda is “nutritionally empty.”

Saletan seems to be personally offended by these arguments – especially the notion that soda is a ‘product’ rather than a ‘food’ and that it is in any way like alcohol or tobacco – but he never really articulates why, beyond vague suggestions of libertarian displeasure. He argues that excluding soda from the set of foods that can be purchased with food stamps would “help… to push soda out of the food category and into a category with alcohol and tobacco, where it can be taxed and restricted more easily.”

What’s the problem with that?

Articles v. blog posts

Over on Slate, Farhad Manjoo has an article up on the convergent trends between blogs and magazines online: magazines are sometimes adopting the reverse-chronological format once definitively linked with blogs, while some blogs are aiming to look more like magazines.

While the distinction between ‘articles’ and ‘blog posts’ can probably never be expressed in a definitive way, there is something to the distinction drawn by Anna Holmes, founding editor of Jezebel:

Pieces that are primarily “reactions to something that already existed in the media or on the Internet”—the bulk of Jezebel content in its early days—are “blog posts.” But Jezebel also publishes many essays that are not riffs on outside material. These weightier, original pieces aren’t set off in any special graphical way on the site, but Holmes still thinks of them as articles, not blog posts.

It’s definitely easier to post a brief reaction to something interesting on another site (as this post does…) than it is to generate something substantive and original.

Testing BuryCoal

As discussed recently, there seem to be a few key ideas about climate change that aren’t yet widely recognized or discussed, much less accepted. The major purpose of BuryCoal.com is to help spread these: arguing that we don’t need to burn all the world’s fossil fuels; that doing so would be extremely dangerous; and that we can choose to leave the carbon embedded in these reserves safely underground forever.

I have personally spent much of the past five years reading and writing about climate change issues. As such, there are a lot of ideas (and a lot of terminology) which is already very familiar to me, where it might not be to most educated people.

If readers are willing, I would really appreciate if they would have a look at BuryCoal.com and the ‘Why bury coal?’ page and identify elements that are confusing, too technical, or otherwise problematic. It doesn’t have much value if is simply serves as a forum for those who agree with the message. It needs to be able to speak to those who have different views, as well.

As always, the site is also looking for contributors.

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula Le Guin’s slim novel tells the story of the early life of Ged: a wizard whose hubris leads him to over-extend his powers, and who must undertake an agonizing quest to address the consequences:

There was no need to hunt the thing down, to track it, nor would its flight avail it. When they had come to the time and place for their last meeting, they would meet.

But until that time, and elsewhere than that place, there would never be any rest or peace for Ged, day or night, on the earth or sea. He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.

It’s a classic parable and well crafted. It’s actually the first book of Le Guin’s I have read, so I feel like I partly corrected an oversight in my general exposure to speculative fiction.

The book is successful at evoking the sense of a fully-formed world, despite not having to give over much time or space to elaborate exposition. That, combined with the consistency and convincingness of the tone, makes the book seem immersive and meaningful.