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It beggars belief that GCHQ would send out Sean the Enforcer to say "Oy! Give us the fookin secrets or we break yer fookin kneecaps!" and the fling around 0.01%
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
It beggars belief that GCHQ would send out Sean the Enforcer to say "Oy! Give us the fookin secrets or we break yer fookin kneecaps!" and the fling around 0.01% of their office equipment. Signals intelligence people simply do not do that. Actual spies rarely do it. Hell, spies in badly written television try to avoid it.
What would really happen is that a GCHQ man from Eton would call up one of his old school chums at the newspaper and they would work out some quid pro quo over tea. Quietly. Discreetly. Like professional spies.
It is barely possible that a rogue group inside GCHQ did this in a spasm of stupidity. It is just an unlikely chain of events for a rogue group to form, obtain the information, and on their own decide to make a spectacular public intervention. That sort of thing simply is not cricket.
My bet is that an outside handler goaded the GCHQ misfits squad into doing something, possibly even planting false orders. France, Russia, and China all have good reason to run GCHQ into the ground.
NSA? Not so much. Britain has long used intelligence sharing with the U.S. to punch way above their weight in international politics. The NSA would not casually throw such a valuable partner under the bus.
Whatever happened, we can at least have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever squad of fuck-knuckles organized the newspaper job are being questioned until their fingernails curl up. And then reassigned to surveil bears in Siberia.
- jlgreco 13y agoOccam's Razor mate. GCHQ did it. There is no reason to perform mental gymnastics to exonerate them.
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoThe reason matters. It's like if grandma seems to have set your dog on fire. You don't say "Oh, what a malicious old bag she is." You dig into the complete chain of events to find out the root cause. Occam's Razor also dictates that a trivially predictable outcome is an intended outcome. This media circus is trivially predictable. Ergo someone, somewhere is counting on the Internet mob to demand rough justice and shout down deeper analysis.
- mikeash 13y agoIt's tempting to think that the media response is intentional on the part of the intelligence agencies. On the other hand: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" I have a feeling that a lot of salaries within these agencies depend on not understanding the inevitable media response to heavy-handed tactics like these.
- mpyne 13y agoOne of my defenses of government in the types of conspiracy theories that get batted around here on HN is that government is staffed by people who are just as stupid as the rest of us, all the way up to the top. The vast majority of people I've met working in government are upstanding, want to do the right thing by their position and the people, but they have just as much highs and lows of average intelligence as the rest of the population. If your one decision maker is on the low end of that spectrum then there is the potential for ridiculously stupid acts to occur. There's no reason this shouldn't apply to GCHQ (and NSA) just as much as it applies to the rest of government. Is it truly impossible that an agency that never operates under press scrutiny would be unfamiliar with which of their actions would exacerbate press scrutiny? I don't know the org. structure for GCHQ but NSA falls under DOD and so there is definitely some familiarity with the idea of "Public Affairs", even if NSA typically never has to engage in such.
- jlgreco 13y agoYour reason for doubting that the GCHQ didn't do it is that it sounds off, but your alternative hypothesis is more complicated and there is no actual evidence of it. Your hypothesis is supported only by your feelings about GCHQ.
- gnerd 13y agoI too like the image of the old Eton boys club handling things smartly and discretely but my gut feeling is that once 100 billion of foreign money is on the table and politicians are involved, things can get a little primitive, very quickly. My feeling is it's probably more important to certain parties at this point to maintain alliances and justify budgets than to maintain certain civil liberties of the public at large. At least that is the way it seems.