The Queen and Alan Turing

On 24 December the UK Ministry of Justice announced that “Renowned scientist and World War II code-breaker Dr Alan Turing has been given a posthumous pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy by the Queen …”. The subsequent media reporting, fairly limited, of course, on Christmas Eve, concentrated on his work at Bletchley Park during World War 2, his being found guilty of gross indecency in 1952 and accepting hormonal treatment, and his suicide two years later at the age of 41 (eg BBC News, MailOnline).

The words "A good day to bury bad news" were never uttered, the actual remark in an email from a government special adviser to her press officer colleagues on 11 September 2001 (9/11) being:

It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?

but the practice of governments releasing information at a time calculated to attract the least attention originated long before then and will doubtless continue into the future. But why was it thought desirable to put out the Turing story just before Christmas - or, alternatively, what was the government hoping to avoid? I can think of a few things. First of all, this type of retrospective apology seems to appeal to politicians who presumably think that their rewriting history will improve their own place in it. Certainly many people believe Turing was treated badly and that his early death deprived his country of an immense talent. But in this particular case the government may want to avoid a debate as to why one homosexual should be pardoned when so many other men with criminal records for similar offences, far from brilliant but still alive, have not. For this reason I am not persuaded by the argument put forward in The Times (£) yesterday by Janice Turner that the pardon was an attempt by the Tories to appear progressive and improve their share of the gay vote – the geek vote, maybe. Nor did she explain why in that case the press release went out on Christmas Eve.

More of a problem for the government is that the pardon is yet another U-turn, having rejected it as recently as February 2012. Also probably best avoided is too much popular attention being given to the machinery of constitutional monarchy. The Ministry of Justice posted the text of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy (below), only the third, it seems, in HM’s 62 years:

To a layman it reads oddly, not so much the quaintness of the legalese, but because it is signed by Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, although in the form of a notification to him of HM’s intent, which in turn only exists because Grayling requested it in the first place! I daresay in presidential systems there are similarly tangles. There is also the irony that Elizabeth II was head of state when the Crown prosecuted Turing in 1952, the case being known as Regina v. Turing and Murray, though it would almost certainly not have been known to her at the time. What her personal opinions are about the desirability of this pardon are, or even whether she has any, we will almost certainly never know.

The announcement of the pardon can only have been helpful to the forthcoming Turing biopic, The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum who has cast Benedict Cumberbatch, best-known as BBC’s Sherlock Holmes, as Turing (above).

Bill Condon's ‘The Fifth Estate’

Being no admirer of Julian Assange, I didn't rush to see Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate when it first came out but recently took the opportunity to do so at the Barn Cinema at Dartington. The film is a docudrama about the emergence of WikiLeaks from the time of Assange's partnering with the German IT expert Daniel Berg in 2007 up to the release of classified US information sourced from Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010 and their association ending. Assange's seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 forms a postscript.

The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale. No location seemed to be used more than twice, usually once, and the numerous sets ranged from Berlin squats to Air Force One (or maybe Two or Three), the action not staying in any of them for long. Benedict Cumberbatch turned in a convincing Assange, and, although the film is a male-dominated nerd and journo fest, it provided a couple of strong supporting roles for Alicia Vikander (Queen Caroline in Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair) as Berg’s long-suffering girlfriend and Laura Linney as a senior level State Department staffer having to pick up the pieces after the Manning disclosures. Peter Capaldi, who is irrevocably the foul-mouthed spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, from The Thick of It for UK TV audiences (the ones who will see this film anyway) until he becomes Dr Who, is cast as Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.

Unfortunately, in terms of allowing comparisons to be made, the real Rusbridger has been on UK TV recently defending his paper's role in handling the material removed from NSA by Edward Snowden. Snowden and the journalist Glen Greenwald have followed the model Assange pioneered with the initial release of the Manning material by cooperating with mainstream media outlets in the form of the Washington Post (vice the New York Times), the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

Snowden and Co have put material into the public domain of much higher classification than Manning was able to access. The US designation for this stuff is TS/SCI - Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information. Years ago such items might be confined to just a few documents, knowledge of whose existence, let alone accessibility, would be confined to select individuals. But now that kind of data is held on globalised IT systems and system administrators set access permissions for individual users. However, an old question arises: who administers the administrators?

When I last wrote about Snowden, on the basis of the information which had been released at that time (July), I affected what now seems too blasé a view. Earlier this month the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) took evidence from Sir Iain Lobban, Director, Government Communication Headquarters, Mr Andrew Parker, Director General, Security Service and Sir John Sawers, Chief, Secret Intelligence Service. (Interestingly the second and third of these men had studied science at university level, but not the first, whose responsibilities, one imagines, are the most technological). A transcript of their uncorrected evidence is available, and the impact of the Snowden release is discussed on pages 16 to 18. Sawers mentions Snowden specifically:

… What I can tell you is that the leaks from Snowden have been very damaging. They have put our operations at risk. It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al-Qaeda is lapping it up ... and our own security has suffered as a consequence.

Further material appearing in Der Spiegel later in the month underlines his point.

In October, one of Lobban’s predecessors, Sir David Omand, had told The Times that the Snowden leaks “eclipse[s] the Cambridge spy ring as the most catastrophic loss suffered by British intelligence”.

“You have to distinguish between the original whistleblowing intent to get a debate going, which is a responsible thing to do, and the stealing of 58,000 top-secret British security documents and who knows how many American documents which is seriously, seriously damaging,” Sir David said. “The assumption the experts are working on is that all that information or almost all of it will now be in the hands of Moscow and Beijing. It’s the most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever, much worse than Burgess and MacLean in the 1950s.”

Omand chose two names from what are often referred to as the Cambridge Five and didn’t mention Kim Philby, although it was these three who finished up as Russian house guests. Whether there was a Fifth Man, and who he was, has been the subject of speculation, the most-fingered suspect being John Cairncross. If so, he was in some ways the most Snowden-like having worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2. But in those days, although primitive computers were in use they certainly weren’t networked, and the only media he could remove was paperwork taken from only one “compartment”, in the form of one of the famous Bletchley Huts.

And who was the Fourth Man? Sir Anthony Blunt made his confession in 1964 in exchange for immunity from prosecution, though the truth (or some of it) would emerge in public in 1979. The Security Service interrogated Blunt because in 1963 an American, Michael Whitney Straight, had told the FBI that he had been a recruiter for Soviet intelligence at Cambridge in the 1930s. Straight was the son of Willard Straight and Dorothy Payne Whitney. Willard died in the Spanish flu epidemic after World War 1. Dorothy remarried and with her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, came to SW England and in 1925 purchased Dartington Hall in Devon (SW England) where Michael Straight would finish his schooling. Which means this post ends geographically back where it started.


UPDATE 4 DECEMBER 

“The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale.” 

But nonetheless it seems to have been the biggest cinematic turkey of 2013, according to Forbes’ Dorothy Pomerantz. The Fifth Estate has earned only $6 million at the box office globally on its $28 million budget, on top of which there will have been marketing costs of as much as $25 million. On average studios receive about 50% of the box office takings, so Dreamworks would be about $25 million down.

Espionnage? Nous?

President George W Bush is supposed to have confided in Tony Blair that “The problem with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”, but reportedly Alastair Campbell told the Washington Post that Blair never heard Bush say it. However, the French, it seems, do have a word for espionnage, so a post for Bastille Day.

Edward Snowden is the computer technician who used to work for a contractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA). After handing out NSA’s secrets he is currently in the transit area of Moscow airport looking for a country to take him in. I gave my simplistic view of such people when posting about Wikileaks over two years ago:

Listening to some of his [Assange’s] former associates the expression attributed to Lenin, ‘useful idiots’, came to mind. While it seems unlikely that the Wikileaks cables initiated the unrest which is spreading through the Middle East, we may well not yet appreciate all the damage that Assange’s activities could cause. The whole underlying principle seems dubious. A bank clerk who steals his employer’s money, even if to give to worthy causes, is a thief and goes to prison. Is that different from an employee who takes his employer’s confidential information and places it in the public domain?

Just how revelatory has the Snowden material been?  During the last few decades the role of Bletchley Park in handling signals intelligence has been woven into the UK’s mythological tapestry of World War 2 alongside the Battle of Britain and D-Day. It’s also widely understood that GCHQ is Bletchley’s successor, for example in the Mail on Sunday on 14 July:

Many of Britain’s top code-breakers and analysts are able to crack complex problems because they suffer from dyslexia, GCHQ has revealed. A spokesman for the Government’s top-secret electronic eavesdropping station in Cheltenham said last night that some of their most talented code-breakers have difficulty in learning to read or interpreting words. But this can actually help them crack codes, as they ‘see’ things those without the disorder do not.

So for many Britons it has been more reassuring than startling to learn that instead of intercepting radio transmissions, attention is nowadays being given to the information hurtling around the internet. The minority of people with a particular interest in this kind of thing will have come across, for example, Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ, James Bamford’s Body of Secrets and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Chatter, not to mention Bamford’s article last year for Wired about the NSA’s Utah Data Center, and won’t have been much surprised in principle about the technical capabilities apparent in the Snowden material. The legality of such data being acquired by states as far as the rights of citizens and international relations are concerned, I will leave to others.

In technical terms what do Snowden’s purloined PowerPoint slides, those which the Guardian first started to reveal on 7 June, actually add? Primarily the names and structure of programmes, the sort of voyeuristic detail which might fascinate because it is intended to be concealed but is now on display for all to see, a sort of NOFORN porn. The fact that large American corporations cooperate with the US government is surely no surprise. And although corporate logos are sprinkled across them, the slides are pretty dull. Only employees who need to master the detail could be expected to sit through such presentations.

The governments of many countries other than the US and UK are well-informed about the activities of NSA, with whom not just the British have links. More informed than they would be solely from the open literature, and more involved than they might want to reveal in public. So many initial overseas reactions to the Snowden leaks were probably calculated to soothe any domestic concerns being stirred up by privacy advocates rather than intended to be rebukes to the US. Triggered by an interview Snowden gave Der Spiegel, France demanded explanations from the US (Espionnage: la France demande des explications aux États-Unis, according to Le Point on 30 June). This met with some cynical responses, including a choice comment from Blogs of War which proposed 10 Short Outrage-Busting Reads on French Spying for President Hollande.

The French then seem to have decided that if their public needed reassurance, it should be that France was up with the hunt. Le Monde on 4 July (Gallic humour) ran an informative article, Révélations sur le Big Brother français:

Si les révélations sur le programme d'espionnage américain Prism ont provoqué un concert d'indignation en Europe, la France, elle, n'a que faiblement protesté. Pour deux excellentes raisons : Paris était déjà au courant. Et fait la même chose.*

which made all of us more au courant by providing graphics (below) and announcing the existence of a crack team of crypto-mathématiciens within the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE, an organisation which seems to cover the ground of the UK’s SIS and GCHQ).

The clear message from Le Monde was:

La France est dans le top 5 en matière de capacité informatique, derrière les Etats-Unis, la Grande-Bretagne, Israël et la Chine.**

So the French certainly have a word for it.

*If the revelations about the U.S. spying program Prism led a chorus of indignation in Europe, France only raised minor quibbles. For two good reasons: Paris already knew. And does the same thing.

** France is in the top 5 in terms of computing power [for NSA-type activities] behind the United States, Britain, Israel and China.


FOOTNOTE

Back in May, before anyone had heard of Edward Snowden, a post appeared here about the impracticality of London turning itself into a city state. Quite by coincidence, among the assets it identified London having to leave in the rump England were GCHQ and the cables coming ashore in the UK, particularly in SW England. The latter were illustrated with a map obtained using an interactive graphic on the Guardian Datablog. It’s interesting to go back to the same graphic and take a look at the Pacific:

Not too hard to see why Snowden was in Hawaii. On the original, clicking on the green cable to the SSE of Hawaii, apparently going nowhere, reveals it to be Honotua which serves French Polynesia.

UPDATE 14 SEPTEMBER

An article, Ex-MI6 deputy chief plays down damage caused by Snowden leaks, by Richard Norton-Taylor and Dominic Rushe which appeared in the Guardian on 12 September is worth reading in full; extracts:

A former senior British secret intelligence officer on Thursday played down any potential damage done by the leaks to the Guardian of the spying activities of GCHQ and America's National Security Agency, apparently contradicting claims made by UK security chiefs.  

The leaks, by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were "very embarrassing, uncomfortable, and unfortunate", Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of MI6, said. While Inkster said it was too early to draw any definite conclusions about the impact of the leaks, he added: "I sense that those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told very much they didn't know already or could have inferred."  

... As for the impact of the revelations about the capabilities of the NSA and GCHQ on allies, Inkster said the reality was any government with a national communications system also had a national signal intelligence capability.  

"The tears that have been shed internationally have been of the crocodile variety," he said in an apparent reference to US allies, notably Germany, which have expressed concern about the activities of the NSA and GCHQ and the extent of their ability to intercept communications.  

Inkster was speaking at a press conference at the launch of the latest annual Strategic Survey published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He left MI6 after the invasion of Iraq and subsequently criticised how Britain "got dragged into a war". He is currently director of transnational threats and political risk at the institute.  

He added that "the degree and scope" of surveillance and eavesdropping by the NSA and GCHQ was a surprising. "I must say that in the space of five years, the technical ability of what the NSA and GCHQ can do is remarkable in getting their arms around a massive surge in communications data."

BBC2's 'Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes'

On 29 October BBC2 showed Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes, in the Timewatch documentary strand. It described how the mathematicians Max Newman and Bill Tutte and GPO research engineers led by Tommy Flowers set about decrypting the German Lorenz code by creating an electronic digital processor called Colossus.

The Bletchley Park huts where the Colossus machine has now been reconstructed were used as the location for some of the interviews and as the background to an explanation of the mechanics of the Lorenz machine (known to the British as Tunny), and the principles of the decoding process. The theme of the programme was that both Tutte and Flowers received less recognition than they were due, and even that was belated, largely because of the inevitable secrecy which surrounds cryptanalysis.

For me, the interesting thing about documentaries concerning the Second World War (another recent example was Operation Jericho – the Mosquito raid on Amiens prison) are the recollections of the remaining, and now quite elderly, participants. Otherwise, the breathless narration, the brandishing of established material as revelation and the music just have to be put up with. But on this occasion the historic re-enactments seemed more crass than usual. I do not believe that the WRNS who worked at Bletchley went to work with high-maintenance hairstyles like 1940s Hollywood starlets, nor were they likely to be on duty wearing lashings of lipstick. Even worse, one of the desks was illuminated by an Anglepoise light of a design launched in the 1970s - which is when I worked briefly with Tommy Flower’s son, one of the interviewees– clever father, clever son.