Sigint Historian

  This is another illustrative extract from Signal! , Captain Barrie Kent’s history of signalling in the Royal Navy. It is about the latt...

This is (yet another) story about the problems ‘Need to Know’ can cause. We start with an MI5 account of surveillance of a Soviet Intelli...

  One of the more interesting questions I had to answer as GCHQ historian was why a large collection of intercepted message logs encrypte...

Just as it’s never difficult to overclassify a piece of information, it’s never difficult to find reasons not to declassify. The same pri...

I imagine that very few people think about the cryptographic consequences of a country breaking up but they can be significant, especiall...

Austerity, belt-tightening, peace dividend: at various points during my career HMG found ways to make my life less simple, either by cutt...

I had an articled published last month in the John Buchan Journal (unsurprisingly, the journal of the John Buchan Society). It is about ...