Daily Archives: December 13, 2014

GCHQ launches new code-making app

Posted on by

Well, well. This from the new, cuddly GCHQ.

Cryptoy is a fun, free, educational app about cryptography, designed by GCHQ for use by secondary school students and their teachers.

The app enables users to understand basic encryption techniques, learn about their history and then have a go at creating their own encoded messages. These can then be shared with friends via social media or more traditional means and the recipients can use the app to try to decipher the messages.

Cryptoy is mainly directed at Key Stage 4 students but can be used by anyone with an interest in learning about or teaching cryptography.

The app was designed by students on an industrial year placement at GCHQ. It was created as part of a project to demonstrate encryption techniques at the Cheltenham Science Festival, and has since been used at several other outreach events. The app was a hit, and GCHQ received interest from teachers who wanted to use it as a teaching aid. Therefore it was decided to make it publicly available.

GCHQ is committed to helping to increase the uptake of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects at schools through its outreach programme and its work with industry and academia. It is also critical that the UK builds a knowledge base of cyber security skills. Learning about encryption and the associated academic disciplines are key parts of both of these.

Android only (for now anyway). Presumably not available to Belgians and officials of the European Commission.

A Thieves’ Thanksgiving

Posted on by

38_00392

This is a great time to be a crook. Not a small-time crook of course — for example, a cat-burglar or a pickpocket, or someone who fiddles his expenses: these knaves invariably get caught and spend time in the slammer. I’m talking about bankers, ‘defence’ contractors, executives of ‘security’ companies (the kind that charge the taxpayer for electronic tagging of people who are deceased or in prison, for example), and the like. They are not only doing just fine, but are apparently untouchable. As Charles Simic explains in a lovely NYRB blog post:

What makes a career in white-collar crime so attractive is that there are so few risks anymore. Everyone knows about Wall Street bankers having their losses from various scams they concocted over the years covered by taxpayers. But now, even when bankers lose billions for their bank by making bad or reckless deals, or have to pay regulatory penalties, as Jamie Dimon, the current chairman, president, and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase did earlier this year, they are more likely to get a 74 percent raise, as he did, than to lose their jobs. As for the federal agencies that are supposed to watch over them and the Justice Department that is supposed to haul these hucksters into court, if they so much as bestir themselves to confront the banks, they simply ask them to pay fines, thereby avoiding a judge or a jury and making sure that the details of their swindles can remain secret from the public.

As dishonest as Wall Street is, it doesn’t compare to the kind of thievery that went on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once upon a time, war profiteers were looked at as the lowest of the low and condemned by presidents. “Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation while patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South and their countrymen mouldering in the dust,” warned Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster,” declared Franklin Roosevelt as the United States entered World War II.

Yet today, according to the Commission on Wartime Contracting, an independent, bipartisan legislative commission established to study wartime contracting, somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion of US government money has been lost through contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is now common knowledge that contractors were paid millions of dollars for projects that were never built, that the Defense Department gave more than $400 billion to companies that had previously been sanctioned in cases involving fraud, and that the beneficiaries of such past largesse have not only gotten fabulously wealthy, but continue to be invited to pursue lucrative business opportunities in the new homeland security–industrial complex.

The Torture Report

Posted on by

Very good roundup on Quartz by Gideon Lichfield.

From outside the US, the Senate intelligence committee’s 528-page report on CIA torture techniques—merely the abridged, non-secret version of the 6,700-page original—seems like America at its best. Harshly critical of an agency that did evil things to produce dubious intelligence while lying to its overlords, it seems to embody the country’s best traditions of transparency and honest self-examination.

But inside the US, the report is a sullied, discredited thing. This was no grave, bipartisan effort like the report of the 9/11 Commission, but—as critics would have it, and not entirely wrongly—a labor of ass-covering spite, produced solely by the committee’s majority Democrats and crafted to shield their own complicity. Republicans have attacked it; former CIA chiefs have risen up (paywall) to defend themselves. And Democrats are worrying about what will happen when, a few years hence, their rivals expose the current administration’s enthusiastic use of drone strikes to the same merciless sunlight.

That is a shame, for the report, though flawed, is truly damning. But, one might shrug, so what? If partisan politics is what it takes to have a national debate about the ethics of warfare, so be it; democracy is messy, and it should take what transparency it can get.

However, this national debate is not like those about race, guns, or the banking system. There, the winners and losers from a policy all have votes or campaign funds with which to sway the outcome. In warfare, the losers—the tortured suspects, the people with relatives blown to bits by drones—are foreigners, with no say. However indignantly liberals may protest the bad things done in their name, when the call comes to “keep America safe,” how many of them will dare challenge it?