It’s 1963, the height of the Cold War. Safely out of sight and earshot, an international espionage agent sits furtively huddled over a short-wave radio, listening intently for strings of seemingly random numbers. Despite the high levels of static interference, they’re painstakingly written down, one by one, and later tabulated against a ‘one time pad‘ […]
Tag: spying
Oblique Linguistic Enigmas: deciphering “NOT/NOT”
Languages, it is said, are never static – words, their meaning, their pronunciation and preferred syntax are constantly evolving. But the changes are not restricted to words – punctuation marks too, evolve. Take, for a recent example, an unusual construct from an official US Govt. source – reprinted by the UK Guardian as part of […]
On the presumed competence of British (and other) spies
Adam Curtis, writing for the BBC, assembled a narrowly focused history of British spying agencies. He focuses on the question of competence: The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden were fascinating. But they – and all the reactions to them – had one enormous assumption at their heart. That the spies know what they are […]