Sarcasm detector required

It's one of those national stereotypes, you know, the offensive ones that the perpetrators don't realise are offensive. Usually aimed at a whole nation, like any modern nation could consistently have one trait. So, not all Germans eat sausages, not all French people think eating the leg of a frog is great and I guess not all Brits speak like Bertie Wooster. In fact, I doubt any Brits do, outside of TV land.

We cultivate these stereotypes because it's an easy, and lazy, way to define what we see as different to us, as a nation. Eating any part of a frog is considered to be weird in the UK, but secretly we probably eat as many sausages per capita as the Germans. But we think our choice of sausages to be better. Naturally we share a lot with our continental neighbours - when we haven't been at war with them we've been spending a lot of time in each others company. We haven't had a decent spat with either the French or the Germans for nearly seventy years now, so that means we should be a lot closer than historically.  I'm still not keen on eating frog parts, mind.

We also share a lot with our US cousins, hence the famous 'special relationship' politicians, mainly British ones, like to mention. But we are as different as we are the same, I guess, and one area Brits like to think they have an upper hand in is in humour. Sure, the UK has exported its fair share of humour, from Monty Python to Douglas Adams, and good British comedic writers make a healthy living in tinsle town. It's probably true that we have a slightly more understated style of humour to that coming over the pond, but from personal experience I know many Americans have a much more subtle sense of humour than US television might suggest sometimes. It's a running gag in the UK, with very little evidence I can find to support it, that Americans have had an irony by-pass and wouldn't recognise sarcasm if they tripped over it.

Like I say, there is little formal evidence for this apparent difference, but now it seems the Secret Service is trying to put the record straight.  Ironically, over this side of the pond, we regard the UK Secret Service to be, well, secret.  To the point that we don't know who are the agents and their activities are traditionally carried out under a cloak of secrecy.  The US Secret Service, however, is often portrayed as being quite open about itself and its employees.  More than that, the US Secret Service is often quite open about what it wants to buy and what it has achieved. And right now it wants to award a contract for a sarcasm detector, for use on social networks.

Probably this is a sensible idea - we all know how the likes of the NSA and the UK GCHQ sift through electronic messages for keywords and 'chatter'.  Many of us probably use words and terms that could be misinterpreted as some of the searched for terms in normal usage and possibly some of us use them from time to time in a sarcastic or ironic way, especially if there has been some governmental or agency activity we don't agree with - the mass interception of emails seems to have irritated a few people recently, for example.

So the Secret Service, probably in an attempt to avoid chasing innocent if sarcastic people so they can concentrate of the real bad guys, are looking for a developer to provide a sarcasm detector.  I just hope it can differentiate between US and UK sarcasm. I think it would be ironic if it couldn't.  Or am I just being sarcastic?

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Heartbleed - two weeks (or two years) on

It almost felt like normality to discover that a fault in the IT security systems around the world had been found, not leaked by a 'whistleblower' or instigated by a government agency. To avoid getting too technical, what the programmers who wrote the code that forms the key cabinet to the main security keys that allow interaction between some servers did was use the best locks available and then placed the master key on a hook alongside. In theory anyone passing this point could unlock the door, copy all the keys inside and then lock the door again, leaving no trace. They didn't even need to bring a virtual bar of soap along (side issue - has any key cutter ever accepted an impression of a key embedded in soap, and if so is it really doable?)

Of course, if you've read my books or sat at the bar with me for an evening will know that I'm reasonably receptive to the odd conspiracy theory. I've also been around long enough to realise that people goof up often enough to make it normal behaviour to be ready to apply Occam's razor too. Here's my take: I don't believe the Heartbleed code to be the work of a criminal activity unless this is a very specialised criminal with very specific goals. Because many of us change passwords relatively frequently, but not as frequently perhaps as industry suggests, there remains a sizeable proportion of people who rarely change theirs. The longer you leave a password, the greater the chance it will be compromised would appear to be an intuitive rule, but of course it's wrong. It's how often you use it and what it protects that forms a greater rule regarding its potential to be hacked. Nonetheless Heartbleed has been around for two years and no major uptick in cyber crime reported. There's been an increase at attempts, sure, but these are from players who were clearly unaware that they simply had to take the key off the hook.

So it's probable that the fault has lain dormant and unnoticed all along. The criminals attempting to break into our bank accounts have been using the equivalent of bricks, crowbars and TNT when the key was under the plant pot. The biggest risk was the period between the news breaking and the patches being applied, when the criminal fraternity would be scrabbling to take advantage of the problem. There remains a residual problem that the security certificates may have been copied, in that virtual bar of soap, so servers need new certificates to be sure. My take is that a lot of organisations are going to incur some cost over the next few months (although this precaution should be done now for high risk servers) and some certificate salespeople are going to get a really good bonus this year.

So much for the rational side of the brain, what about the conspiracy theory? Well the NSA and GCHQ agencies have come under a lot of stick lately for reading our emails etc. As I've said before, they can read mine anytime they like, I'll bcc them if it helps, but wouldn't something like Heartbleed be a cheaper and easier way of getting around encryption than developing super-powerful computers to decrypt our last minute shopping lists (milk, coffee, C4, timer, bread)? And maybe leaking a security breach before Snowden reveals it anyway, but after a more secure and harder to find backdoor has been developed, is a convenient way of diverting attention?

But don't mind me, I've just finished writing a book, Assassin, that deals with a future British government so paranoid about terrorism that it would do anything from curtailing civil liberties to reading every email of its subjects just to try and control events. I didn't put Heartbleed in - that story broke after I finalised the book and set it up for pre-order, but it would have fitted like a glove. If governments gone wrong is your bag, be sure to check out Assassin.

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Snowden Reveals All in Exclusive Interview

In a surprise interview, outlawed whistle-blower Edward Snowden has broken out of hiding to explain his reasons for leaking NSA files to the press, prompted by being voted Guardian Personality of the Year. Some of the details of his interview, which is classified, has been leaked by a spokesperson on a temporary contract with the government.

"It wasn't my intention to embarrass my employer, or indeed the government, and being voted to the top award of the year by less than 1500 Guardian readers is an insult," Snowden is alleged to have said. "It was important that I let the world know what a difficult job NSA do, and leaking the files was the only practical way I had of achieving that."

Snowden, currently hiding in a secret location in Moscow, apparently gave his interview from his Holiday Inn room on the fourth floor last night. He allegedly explained just how difficult it was for analysts attempting to tease apart the chaff from the wheat. "There's a lot of shit out there on the internet!" Snowden is understood to have complained. "And a lot of that shit comes from bloggers," he is understood to have added. "Just how an analyst is supposed to differentiate between an encoded terrorist message and a stream of techno-babble bullshit in a so-called tech blog, I don't know," he is alleged to have said, exasperation beading his entire face, presumably.

"The only reliable way of checking the veracity of some of these blogs was to intercept every email, Tweet and Facebook message to look for corroborating evidence," he is understood to have suggested, if a little lamely. He was especially full of praise, apparently, for the assistance the NSA received from the British GCHQ organisation. "Quite how the NSA was expected to read every email and Facebook post I don't know," the unnamed source, Brian, claimed Snowden said. "The Brits - Lord they can read fast," he is understood to have added. "And their capacity to wade through shit is the stuff of legends," he is said to have announced.

Snowden was apparently less forthcoming when asked about the NSA posing as game-players on XBOX multi-person games. "That was GCHQ too," it is believed he stated, "they're a bunch of frigging geeks over there," he is alleged to have said. It is understood that he pointed in the direction of Kiev when this alleged allegation was made, but most analysts have assumed he thought he was pointing towards Cheltenham. However this is apparent speculation that NSA analysts are currently poring over in the hope that it may reveal information about Snowden's current location, possibly the location of a terrorist cell or even Cheltenham.  Mathematical modellers on short term contracts to the NSA are understood to be reverse engineering the point from Cheltenham's last known location, in an attempt to identify Snowden's hiding place in room 401.

"I don't know how I can sort this mess out," Snowden is believed to have said, adding, "you would think room service would do something about it," while waving an arm across the pile of fast food containers spread over his bed. "The NSA problem, I'm sure they'll get over that," he is understood to have suggested, adding, "they're incredibly busy, especially now they have discovered a trove of allegedly secret information that may be encoded as facts on this Wikipedia website they've just discovered. Apparently they assumed it was a classic British disinformation exercise, then they discovered that it was the main source of intelligence for MI6, had been since just before the second Gulf War," Brian stated Snowden had said before turning bright red. "Oh shit," he apparently stated as he ushered Brian out of the secret location next to the stairway with a Coke machine in, "I think that information is classified," he is believed to have said. "With luck one of those hapless bloggers will pick up on it and report it in their blog. At least no-one will believe the story then, and I'll be off the hook," he is believed to have asserted.

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Spooked by Technology

There's been a lot of controversy in the intelligence world lately.  There's no doubt about the challenges facing intelligence agencies the world over - terrorism is global, the impact of terrorist attacks dreadful.  Those of us who live in democracies have to accept that there is a balancing act that needs to be squared - do we stamp all over everybody's liberties or do we risk letting the bad guys go by acknowledging the freedoms that democracy stands for?

It's a difficult enough situation when looked at from a pure intelligence perspective; add the egos of politicians and the arrogance of journalists into the mix and the man in the street is hard pushed to know what is reasonable and what isn't.

I personally didn't bat an eyelid at the 'revelation' a few months ago that revealed that UK emails were being routinely scanned for keywords that might indicate a terrorist attack.  There were two reasons for this.  First, it seems to be a sensible thing to do - there are millions of emails floating across the UK, let alone internationally, every day and some of these will refer to illegal activities.  Most won't.  Most will be thanking friends and family for attending the surprise party for Aunt Mable, many will be general chit chat, some will be business related.  The same can be said for the many Facebook entries, the Tweets, the text messages and the myriad other ways we communicate with each other. MI6, MI5 and GCHQ have finite resources so although technically every message can be scanned and read electronically, in reality only a small fraction can be physically read by a real person.  These guys are busy, so unless you're a terrorist or some other criminal you shouldn't be too concerned.

The other reason I didn't go eyelid batting is that I thought we all knew this anyway.  Then I remembered that I had dealt with people on the periphery of this technology in the early part of the Century - perhaps I'd learned something that was on the secret list and forgotten that it was a secret.  It doesn't matter now - the cat's well and truly out of the bag and I never mentioned it because - well - I thought everybody knew.

But now, following the revelations by Edward Snowden, the American who passed loads of classified documents to the press, the intelligence community says it is in turmoil.  Even worse than that, the heads of the three agencies mentioned above have been summoned to a Select Committee of MPs to be grilled on their actions.  Apart from the obvious point that we have to just accept that the three guys who turned up today - and unlike our energy providers they didn't shun parliament - are the people that they say they are.  They're the intelligence community, for goodness sake!  Deception is their stock in trade.

So British TV has been treated to a spectacle of a group of people professionally trained to lie while constructing a world of smoke and mirrors interviewing the heads of the intelligence services.

Accountability is an important part of democracy, as is freedom.  These three guys and the people who work for them are working flat out to keep us as safe as can be managed without trampling on too many civil liberties.  Perhaps sitting in front of the MPs and answering searching questions is an opportunity to explain this but hopefully not at the expense of running their organisations. 

I don't know if Snowden's actions can be justified or whether they have caused real harm or not to the intelligence community (we'll never know, because this level of subterfuge is their day job), but I'm OK with them reading my emails.  I think most people shouldn't be too bothered about their Facebook or twitter feeds being intercepted.  Perhaps what is needed is a level of honesty - just state that a certain amount of electronic traffic is going to be scanned, make it a part of day-to-day internet usage.  After all, anyone who walks down a British high street is being recorded on CCTV from all angles for myriad reasons - security, safety, enforcement - and those images are often used by the law enforcement agencies, including the three mentioned above, to identify where specific people have been and when.  We don't throw our hands up and stamp our feet, apart from when the camera catches us speeding.

If it was accepted that effectively MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, plus the NSA, FBI and CIA (and if this post doesn't get intercepted after writing down that lot, then nothing on the internet tonight will) effectively follow us on Twitter and are clandestine Friends on Facebook then there wouldn't be any need for the likes of Snowden to sneak information out of the office and pass it to the press.  Sure, we wouldn't know the details of how many of our blog posts, FB threads, Twitter feeds etc had been read (unless the intelligence community gets behind liking them), but really, does it matter?

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To Catch a Spy - Early

Anyone brought up on a diet of John Le Carre novels will have a reasonable idea of how spies were recruited in the UK in the fifties.  In fact anyone reading about the Burgess and Maclean recruitment into both the British Secret Service and the employ of the Soviet Union - talk about moonlighting - will realise that Le Carre actually knew a thing or two.

But Burgess and Maclean, in fact the whole Cambridge Five, showed that the concept of recruiting from the two most elite universities in the UK via the discrete tap on the shoulder was a faulted system.  Sure the world of espionage and counter-espionage needs bright cookies, but those two universities also seem to engender a certain degree of self assuredness that probably distorted the eventual employer.

And while it is fair to say that the students at Oxford and Cambridge have always tended to be amongst the brightest in the country, they haven't had the absolute monopoly on bright students.

However intellectual capability is one of the facets of modern intelligence that is still valued.  Unlike the almost super hero skills touted by Ian Fleming's James Bond and the socially inept anti heroes featured in Le Carre novels, the reality of counter-espionage is the ability to analyse seemingly huge amounts of data and identify trends and clues distributed randomly, finding the literal needle in the haystack.  Some computer skills  necessary then, perhaps super geek level for starters?

In the novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Le Carre had his main character, who was pretending to be a double agent for the East Germans, keep an eye out for whether the British Secret Service were ordering more paper clips than before, as that could indicate an uptick in activity.  Except he didn't call it uptick, obviously.  And of course, even if it did indicate an uptick, would that necessarily have been a useful indication to the East Germans?  It's not like we ignored them for long during the Cold War.

Today, along with all the traditional intelligence channels - information gleaned from individuals and dissected from newspapers - the intelligence services have many other forms of communication to wade through; social networks, text messaging, news channels on satellite stations and internet blogs (grief - who reads them?) for example, and much of this will be old, some will be badly recycled, a lot will be engineered to hide or divert away from the truth. The modern analyst really doesn't have the time or need to develop the skills of James Bond or the cast of Spooks, he or she is drowning in data trying to extract a semblance of the truth from it.

But of course the really sensitive stuff, the plans of an attack, the secrets that people want to keep that way, won't be in plain sight, and won't be in clear. It'll be in code, and that is where the mathematicians that have traditionally been recruited in Oxford and Cambridge come into their own.

The tap on the shoulder is long gone - if you're eligible (bright, British and of a reasonable character) then you can apply to join the British Secret Services - Such as MI5 or MI6 (actually known as the Secret Intelligence Service - SIS).  Be warned, they are picky.  But they're good and the work is probably very rewarding.

However the real code-breaking stuff takes place not in London but in a town called Cheltenham, at a location called GCHQ - yup, you can apply for a job there too .  But they aren't waiting for the brightest and the best to beat a path to their door, they're making it easier for them to identify tomorrow's code-breakers and to provide a taster for those with the ability but perhaps who may not realise that code-breaking is a real job.    They sponsor a competition aimed at British schools - overseas schools have tried to enter without luck - with the aim of pitching increasingly more difficult cyphers to be decrypted.   The uptake is accelerating - historically about 200 teams apply to take place, however this year 1600 teams have had a crack.  To be fair, only 30 of the teams managed to complete all of the levels in a competition that run for nearly two months.

Of course, most of the entrants won't want to be code-breakers.  But some will display a talent that may be missed through normal school curricula and, well, normal teenage life and these will almost certainly be earmarked for follow up.

Perhaps the tap on the shoulder when they reach Cambridge will make a come back after all?

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