How Margaret Thatcher's Brahms phone was invented
bbc.com
bbc.com
You can hear it at this location, from 2:41:00-2:45:00, though being the BBC it’s hidden behind maddening levels of access.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018177
If you’d like details on something more modern, you can read about the Brent
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/vigilant/l...
https://tentacle.net/~chrisr/bookshelf/Stephenson,%20Neal%20...
Can't vouch for what he wrote of course but he probably got a lot of the details right.
The article is super shallow.
It mentions how the machine didn't work very well with high frequency (female) voices, it sets up a tense moment where there were only women working in the office and an agent called them, it builds the tension with > "We knew that every piece of information we were sending out to our chaps was significant," she says, recalling watching the importance of their work reflected back on the TV news.
And then.. what happened next? The author deviates and doesn't conclude the story! Is he a 7th grade high schooler, this is their level of writing...
"We knew that every piece of information we were sending out to our chaps was significant," she says, recalling watching the importance of their work reflected back on the TV news.
Even at Primary School here in the UK, kids were being propagandised and I bet it still goes on today, most recently with the Jubilee!
The Royal Family have the nickname "The Firm" here in the UK, but it also extends out the wider military forces and members of the armed forces both active and retired, as a term of endearment for themselves when they are intimidating and harassing members of the public in an organised crime syndicate manner.
However my point is, with hindsight I object to the propaganda and one sided nature of the clearly biased teaching I was subjected to at the time, possibly even without parental consent because its not like many parents even get a say in what their kids are taught. The knock on effect is now starting to play out, decades later!
More recently, the BBC seems to prefer to talk down their home country armed forces.
With some cojones. So something you may not have experienced and witnessed if you stayed in one area, is that education was different in different parts of the country, sometimes within the same county. I suspect some of this was a stealth attempt to create future opportunities in deprived parts of the country, but that's the optimist in me which is almost certainly misguided.
>More recently, the BBC seems to prefer to talk down their home country armed forces.
If a country has got to the stage where its got to send the troops in, then you have already lost the argument and are now resorting to violence, that's hardly enlightened is it, and justifies every individual in both country's to get violent over the same conflict or any other disagreement now or in the future. Its not setting an example by the very entity that wants ultimate authority! What an excellent example we should all aspire to be... not!
Prison populations is a measure of the state's failings and who has the largest prison populations? The US and UK.
Why does USUK dominate the global stage in hard power (US) and soft power(UK)? Maybe its that Viking Raider mentality, raping and pillaging everything in its path?
Just anything to support the concept that tens of thousands of individuals of myriad types and interests are acting in a concerted manner to intimidate and harass the rest of the population will do.
It's designed to elicit feelings rather than facts. State discussion of its technologies is suspicious, this comment says.
AFAIK digital speech codecs were a thing in 1980, and implementing a symmetrical block cipher on 2.4KHz would have been possible using discrete logic or a processor like the Z80.
Up to that point a different system was used, called a "scrambler". Speech was fed into a vocoder (parallel filter bank). The energy in each band would be used to resynthesise the speech using a reverse vocoder (noise/oscillator bank). In a scrambler the bands are shuffled before sending, and unshuffled at the other end.
The result is speech-like, but incomprehensible.
In terms of security this is no more complex than a simple transposition cipher. An adversary would have to record the conversation and then set about trying every band transposition. In practice you'd only have to get a few right for the speech to become intelligible once again, so the value was really to stop real time snooping and slow down an eavesdropper.
The BBC article fails to communicate how the move to a digitised block cipher offered considerable security advantages over the incumbent systems.