4 ms·
While it's entertaining to think of wannabe terrorists reading materials about cupcakes, surely this is a missed opportunity? Wouldn't it have made sense to pl
by mdda 15y ago
While it's entertaining to think of wannabe terrorists reading materials about cupcakes, surely this is a missed opportunity?
Wouldn't it have made sense to plant almost-correct recipes for bomb making, back-doored advice on computer security, and lukewarm calls to Jihad?
(Maybe this has happened elsewhere - and this is just MI-6 thumbing their noses at the website owners)
- sorbus 15y agoThis is the perfect way to hide such actions, though - an extremely obvious change, so that more subtle changes will be ignored. The article does note that MI6 is continuing to target the magazine, too, so it wouldn't be surprising if they were making subtle changes.
- VMG 15y agoReally? Now that they know that they are compromised, they will actively look for all changes.
- rahoulb 15y agoGiven that MI6 didn't even officially exist till quite recently, I imagine that the fact that this is made public means it is just the tip of the iceberg.
- michaelcampbell 15y agoMaybe you're much older than I so our contexts are different, or wikipedia is wrong, but it says there that the /term/ MI-6 has been around since world war 2, referring to the SIS. The existence has been only publicly acknowledged since 1994.
- rahoulb 15y agoyeah I meant the public acknowledgement (although 1994 is earlier than I remember it).
- JoeP 15y agoThe problem I suspect, with only slightly altered bomb recipes, is that you leave room for experimentation. A potential terrorist could try and work out how to correctly concoct a bomb after your supplied recipe has failed, he might even succeed. Also, explosives by their very nature are unstable and providing a recipe slightly wrong could lead to premature explosion: 'Great!' you might think 'One less terrorist!' but terrorists don't often operate in seclusion, they operate in residential areas (look at the London 7/7 bombers, for instance). Meaning innocent people could be injured by their bomb making. The deliberately bad computer security advice would seem a better idea, like 'Download the official Al Qaeda security suite! That only COINCIDENTALLY sends all your personal information and location to the security services!'.
- gaius 15y agoIt was reported on the news that the 7/7 bombers rejected the use of GPG or similar as being too imperialist, so they made up their own crypto software called Mujaheddin Secrets. Only it wasn't as cryptic as they thought!