Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • March 9, 2018 2:04 PM

@ echo,

There are other highlights such as the British being ahead along with the old and very valuable imperial telecommunications routes being used in exchange for use of American resources

The reaaon for that was not even a handfull of people at Bletchly Park. All through WWII the British were short of everything for the same reason it nearly came to lose WWI. Submarines sinking shiping. Britain had been more or less dependent on imports sinc the 1800’s payed for with “finished goods” that were exported back. Contrary to what politicians say the UK is still way more dependent on manufacturing than it is on the vagaries of the “service industry” like Banking and the Financial industry. Manufacturing as it happens is also more democratic than the very autocratic service industry, because the skills it relies on are almost always in the hands of the many rather than the power of a few.

So it was with Bletchly Park, what it did like all manufacturing industry was take a raw input (intercepts etc) and using a value added process produce reliable intelligence reports and other products of which other parts of Bletchly such as the “registry” was an internal customer who inturn supplied other customers that produced “probables” and the biggest secret of all “traffic analysis”.

Much of Bletchly was built not by administrators but a few individuals seeing bottle necks and a need for information processing in effective and efficient ways. Effectively the mathmeticians, scientists and the young ladies of privilege brought up to run large houses and the attendent large staffs.

What this less than a handfull of people realised was that they did not have the hidden resources for the job. Things were moving from the mind to the hand of control on machines built to be reliable and effective. These machines needed resources the British did not have. Thus the question of what to trade in return. The British politics had fallen into a bad habit of giving away the family silver for a quick fix (something we are stupidly doing today). The list is long and the longterm loss unimaginable. The less than a handfull realised that what Britain had was brains and knowledge what the US had was brawn and resources. The trick would be to stop the brains getting eaten by the brawn or worse sold by the pound as dead meat by the politicians.

What the less than a handfull came up with was the British USA (BRUSA) agreement which in a way was to turn the British inteligence operation into a service industry. The difference being that it was a Value Added service industry which acted in part as a consultancy. Knowledge and processes would be commoditized and likewise the roads the knowledge travelled.

Whilst still bloody, the collapse of the British Empire over all was in a way a similar process leaving a Commonwealth of more or less cooperating nation states that still looked to the UK for knowledge, processes and education that facilitated trade and cooperation between the new nation states. In many ways a service it still provides. Other nations with empires either abandoned them or in effect went to war with them thus did not get future benifit or cooporation of the new nations that arose from their collapsing empires[1]. likewise the new nations got little benifit either as they went their own often compeating ways thus becoming vulnerable and suffering anew (something Cecil Rhodes not just realised but ruthlessly put in place then exploited in Africa).

Thus in the Five-Eyes the stranger in the nest is the US whilst it provides many raw resources for the machines, it is dependent on the Commonwealth nations to provide the raw resources for it’s product in more ways than perhaps they realise. Thus what the less than a handfull saw and put in place has outlasted them and continues to this day in effect cooperation as partners not be sold by the pound and consumed. However UK politicians as short sighted as all their brethren want to “fire sale” such assets so they can “fail to fix the mistakes they made yesterday” demonstrating the form of insanity Einstein cautioned against. One such major failing was British Education another the UK NHS. There is an incorrect belief in politicians especially that “we can do it the US way” without actually having any kind of understanding of either system. Instead what we have is politicians selling their immortal soles cheap to self interested consultants and the real paymasters of the consultants. The result of which has given us recession after recession and transfered power from the politicians to the corporations of which “to big to fail” is just one asspect. Thus the inmates have not just taken over the asylum, they have escaped and taken over the nation and turned it into an asylum (via “deregulation” etc).

Thus you can compare the results of the two systems, of longterm cooperation and short term greed and see which provides the lasting benifits for all, cooperation or greed.

[1] Much like the Monty Python sketch of “What did the Romans ever do for us” you can ask questions about what was left of an empire. There was a nice line from a Vietnamese Diplomat once when asked that about France. After a moments thought he replied “Buildings and bread” paused and then effectively said “The buildings crumble a little more each day but the bread we make anew each day”. Which made the same point about “teaching a man to fish” that it’s knowledge and how to apply it that is the lasting legacy.