The Machine Never Blinks: A Graphic History of Spying and Surveillance (book)

In The Machine Never Blinks, the story of surveillance is presented from its earliest days, to help you more fully understand today's headlines about every-increasing, constant, and unrelenting monitoring and global data collection.
This book spans surveillance from the Trojan Horse, through 9/11 and to the so-called War on Terror, which enabled the exponential growth of government and corporate intercepts and databases.

It also explains spying as entertainment (reality TV) and convenience (smart speakers). Take a look around... Who's watching you right now? Black & white illustrations. more

Rare World War II Footage Released - British Spy Center

A silent film shows MI6 staff members at a site linked to the code-breaking facility Bletchley Park during World War II.

Like a home movie reel, the silent footage shows young people at candid moments: playing soccer and cricket, sunbathing, smiling and making faces at the camera...

But they were not ordinary office colleagues: They were off-duty secret British communications staffers, linked to code-breakers who decrypted German ciphers and helped the Allies win World War II.

The newly revealed footage features staff members of the MI6 Section VIII — the British spy agency’s communications staff — filmed at a site associated with the famous code-breaking facility Bletchley Park. more

In the Era of Hacking, Bugs Remain a Critical Espionage Threat

via Scott Stewart, Vice President Tactical Analysis at Stratfor

HIGHLIGHTS

• While cyberattacks offer a powerful means for corporate surveillance, it is important to remember that it is just one option in the espionage toolbox.
  
• Some information, such as in-person conversations, cannot be obtained through hacks and thus require the use of other tools, such as human intelligence collection insiders or covert audio and video recorders and transmitters (bugs).
  
• Today, bugs are cheaper, smaller and easier to obtain than ever — and the number being deployed and discovered is vastly under-reported, masking the true scope of the threat.
  
• Therefore, in order to adequately combat corporate espionage, organizations must also implement security measures to protect against bugging. more

Encryption Using Palindrome Number (Never odd or even.)

Posted in honor of this special day*

This paper provides a technique for message security in which palindrome number is used for encryption message. Colour is important in authentication process as it acts as a password. Using this technique message can be protected from on-line cyber crime and accessible to an authorized individual when required.  more

Who cares? The important thing is this historical date... 

02/02/2020 
*Palindrome Day... for the first time in 909 years! Wow, yet another palindrome!

Here in the U.S., it is also a trifecta: Palindrome Day, Groundhog Day and Superbowl Sunday.

Espionage Weekend Movie: "The Current War"

Don't let the fancy attire and the Gilded Age setting fool you, there is nasty business afoot in "The Current War."

It's a power struggle, both literal and societal, with Benedict Cumberbatch as inventor Thomas Edison on one side, Michael Shannon as industrialist George Westinghouse on the other, Nicholas Hoult as eccentric visionary Nikola Tesla in the middle and the future of electricity in America hanging in the balance.



In theaters Friday, Oct. 25, the film is a tale of innovation advanced via moral compromise. There are dead animals, corporate espionage, even the invention of the electric chair all deployed in the battle to determine whether Edison's direct current or Westinghouse's alternating current would light up the nation.

It's a story rife with tragedy and squandered potential. more

Julian Assange’s Hideout May Have Been Bugged

A Spanish security firm that worked for the Ecuadorean embassy in London is being investigated on suspicion it spied on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for US secret services.

Spain’s National Court says it is investigating whether David Morales and his Undercover Global SL security agency invaded Assange’s privacy and that of his lawyers by installing hidden microphones and other devices in the embassy.

It said the information gathered appeared to have been passed on to Ecuadorean and US bodies. more

UPDATE - Director of Spanish security company that spied on Julian Assange arrested.

Book - The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

via By Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
The history of espionage is a lesson in paradox: the better your intelligence, the dumber your conduct; the more you know, the less you anticipate.

Is intelligence intelligent? This is the question that runs or, rather, leaps through the mind of the reader struggling with Christopher Andrew’s encyclopedic work “The Secret World: A History of Intelligence” (Yale).

Andrew, who is a longtime history don at Cambridge, begins his book...with one of the most appealing opening lines in recent nonfiction: “The first major figure in world literature to emphasize the importance of good intelligence was God.”

The Israelites’ reconnaissance mission to the promised land of Canaan is the first stop in Andrew’s tour of four thousand years of spying; the last is the American failure to anticipate 9/11.

For anyone with a taste for wide-ranging and shrewdly gossipy history—or, for that matter, for anyone with a taste for spy stories—Andrew’s is one of the most entertaining books of the past few years. more

How Music Has Made Auditory Surveillance Possible

An interesting article on the history of electronic eavesdropping...
For as long as we’ve been able to transmit sound through the ether, it seems, someone has been listening in... more

The Peregrination of a Childhood Promise

Finally, another childhood fantasy becomes reality. Hard on the heals of wall screen TVs; Dick Tracy's wrist radio.

• The now iconic 2-way wrist radio premiered in 1946 and was replaced with a 2-way wrist TV in 1964.
• 1952 prototype wrist radio.
• 1960's wrist radio.
• Apple watch Walkie-Talkie.
• FutureWatch: A "Real" Dick Tracy wrist radio watch. (Bluetooth)
• Wrist radios on ebay.
• Wrist radios on Amazon.
• In June of 1954, the radio was upgraded to increase the range from 500 miles to 1,000 miles, then again in 1956 to 2,500 miles. 

Chester Gould’s idea of Tracy wearing something like this on his wrist in the comic strip was actually turned down by his employer because it was thought to be too much of a cheat, so-to-speak, an easy way out for the detective who had been written into a scene where he was held captive with no possible way of escaping from the criminals.

It was then that Gould decided to call an inventor he had met, Al Gross (pictured above).

Al Gross was a man way ahead of his time with inventions such as the walkie-talkie. When Gross was just 16 years old, he already had an amateur radio operator's license and had built a ham radio going on to invent the first telephone pager in 1949.

When Gould stopped by, Al Gross had just recently invented a two-way radio that people could wear on their wrists, just like a watch. Gould asked Gross if he could use his idea and that’s where Dick Tracy’s wrist watch radio came into being. Gould was so appreciative that as a Thank You, he gave Gross the first four panels of the cartoon where Tracy is seen wearing and using the soon-to-be infamous gadget. The device proved to be the exact answer for Dick Tracy to rescue himself from the seemingly impossible situation.

Still on my list...
  UPDATE - 8/27/19
Apple reportedly kills project to turn iPhone into 'walkie talkie'
Damn!

A Brief History of Surveillance in America

By April White, Smithsonian Magazine

For the last several years, Brian Hochman has been studying electronic surveillance—both the technological developments that have made eavesdropping possible and the cultural and political realities that have made it a part of American life for more than 150 years...

How far back do we have to go to find the origins of wiretapping?
It starts long before the telephone. The earliest statute prohibiting wiretapping was written in California in 1862, just after the Pacific Telegraph Company reached the West Coast, and the first person convicted was a stock broker named D.C. Williams in 1864. His scheme was ingenious: He listened in on corporate telegraph lines and sold the information he overheard to stock traders...

It’s only in the 1920s that ordinary Americans start to take notice of wiretapping and it's not really until the 1950s that it's seen as a national problem...

The House Intelligence Committee looked into illegal wiretapping in 1975 as part of its investigation of risks of U.S. intelligence operations. Michael Hershman (holding a 'plug bug') explaining surveillance and counter-surveillance technology. (AP Photo/Charles Gorry)

FutureWatch...
Historians are not in the business of prognostication, but the one thing that I can say with some certainty is that electronic surveillance and dataveillance are going to scale. They will be more global and more instantaneous. I can say with much more certainty that that public attention to these issues will wax and wane. more

The ‘Golden Age of SIGINT’ May Be Over

The US government cannot control the skyrocketing use of encrypted communications that allow adversaries, terrorists, criminals — and ordinary folks who care deeply about privacy, including journalists — to block eavesdropping by national security agencies, says a new study funded by DARPA and the Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism (CAST).

“The ‘golden age of SIGINT’ may be over, particularly within the next five or ten years,” the study, “Going Dark: Implications of an Encrypted World,” finds. The traditional methods of collecting signals intelligence and eavesdropping on communications used by the Intelligence Community (IC) will no longer be effective. “End-to-end encryption of all communications and data, differential privacy, and secure communications for all users are likely to be the new reality,” the study says. more

FREE: "Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security" GCHQ Exhibit in London

Historic gadgets used by British spies will be revealed for the first time later this week, as one of the country's intelligence agencies steps out the shadows to mark its centenary -- and to educate people about the risks of cyber-attacks.

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) will hold an unprecedented exhibition at London's Science Museum, taking visitors through 100 years of secret conversations and eavesdropping...

A prototype of the Enigma cipher machine used by the Germans will be on display. But the standout exhibit at this new exhibition is the 5-UCO machine developed in 1943 to send decrypted German messages to officers in the field...

"Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security" opens to the public on Wednesday and runs until February 2020. more

FREE but must book ahead: Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD  ~Kevin

Historical - A Covert Transmitter & A Mistake = Early Fake News

February 13, 1935 was probably the first case of a major news organization incorrectly reporting a courtroom verdict because of a radio communications fail - the birth of Fake News! 

Flemongton, NJ - The Associated Press (AP) thought it was being uniquely creative - and sneaky - during "The Trial of the Century" involving the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindberg's young son. A reporter secreted in a miniature shortwave transmitter, concealed within a leather brief case. A receiver station above the courtroom stood ready to copy the agreed upon code, based on the verdict, and send the results to its newspaper feeds.

Little did they know that a competing news agency had the same idea, but used a different code. The AP operator received the New York Daily News code assuming it was from the AP mole. It immediately sent the story to hundreds of editors across the world.

One of the short-wave transmitters carried by a reporter into the courtroom at Flemington was concealed in a small leather brief-case...

Short Wave Craft described how to build a short-wave set in a brief-case in the June 1932 issue - three years earlier! With a slight change in the connections, this receiver is easily converted into a transmitter for code signals, such as those used at the Hauptmann trial.

Short waves played a most important role in the famous million-dollar Hauptmann trial. Two tiny short-wave transmitters were secretly carried by reporters into the courtroom and were used to signal the jury's verdict to other reporters outside the locked courtroom. more

Killed for Spying: The Story of the First Factory

Piedmont, in north-west Italy, is celebrated for its fine wine. But when a young Englishman, John Lombe, traveled there in the early 18th Century, he was not going to savoir a glass of Barolo. His purpose was industrial espionage. 

Lombe wished to figure out how the Piedmontese spun strong yarn from silkworm silk. Divulging such secrets was illegal, so Lombe snuck into a workshop after dark, sketching the spinning machines by candlelight. In 1717, he took those sketches to Derby in the heart of England.

Local legend has it that the Italians took a terrible revenge on Lombe, sending a woman to assassinate him. 

Whatever the truth of that, he died suddenly at the age of 29, just a few years after his Piedmont adventure. more

A Favorite M.I.B. — M.I.A. — R.I.P. Torn

      February 6, 1931 – July 9, 2019

Porcelain — An Industrial Espionage Story

1712 A.D. ...a French Jesuit priest named François Xavier d’Entrecolles pioneered industrial espionage by recording the secrets of porcelain making while on a trip to China and sending them back to Europe...

Another remarkable use for porcelain is the lithophane, a sheet of porcelain so thin as to be translucent, with artwork etched into it. The lithophane is thin enough that the art can only be seen when backlit, but just thick enough that the image can have depth. Lithophanes began to appear in several parts of Europe in the 1820s, but they’re believed to have originated in China a millennia earlier during the Tang Dynasty. Later Ming Dynasty scholars wrote of Tang bowls “as thin as paper” that included secret images.

FLIR Black Hornet - US Army Mini-Drones Deployed - Flying Binoculars

• US Army soldiers are, for the first time, getting personal reconnaissance drones small enough to fit on a soldier's utility belt.
• A soldier could send one of these little drones out to get a view of the battlefield all while staying put in a covered, concealed position.
• This awesome technology is a potential game changer, one that is expected to save lives by significantly reducing the risk soldiers take in battle. more  Early promo video.  Want one for your desk. Check eBay.

Military mini-drones have been a holy grail since the 1970's. Since 2009 they have developed rapidly. In 2019 they are a practical reality and are being deployed. 

FutureWatch: Expect many additional capabilities over a short period of time. Poisonous mosquitoes, self-planting eavesdropping bugs, anyone?

Mini-Drone History
Early 2014 Army version.
The British Army version from 2013. 
2009 DARPA version.
1970's CIA version.
For all of our drone posts, click here.  
Enjoy. ~Kevin

Q: "You'll be using this Aston Martin DB5."

James Bond: Ejector seat? You must be joking.

Q: I never joke about my work 007.

If Goldfinger’s henchman Oddjob is coming after you, Aston Martin has just the car you need. It will cost a lot, though.

Ten months ago Aston Martin announced it would build a limited number of 1964 Aston Martin DB5s, just like the one Sean Connery, as James Bond, first drove in the movie “Goldfinger.” Twenty-five of these cars will be sold at a price of £2.75 million, or about $3.5 million. Each car will include a host of dangerous-sounding options, just like the one in the movie, Aston Martin said.

Aston Martin has finally announced what some of those gadgets will be. The cars will have, among other things, rotating license plates that can show three different tags and replica machine guns that poke out from behind the turn signals. Other clever features will include a “smoke screen” device to hide the car from pursuers and... more

Granny Was A Spy

UK - In 1999, an 87-year-old British woman held a press conference in front of her home to announce that for nearly four decades, she’d worked as a spy for the Soviet Union.

In fact, Melita Norwood was the Soviet Union’s longest-serving British spy...

In 1979, she and her husband—who knew about her spying and disapproved—visited Moscow so the Soviet Union could award her the Order of the Red Banner (she accepted the honorary award, but turned down the financial reward).

How did Norwood get away with it for so long? more

International Spy Museum is Moving and Expanding

The name isn’t changing, but when International Spy Museum opens in its shiny new home in May, it’s going to be about a lot more than just spies. 

The museum, armed with a 140,000-square-foot new building at 700 L'Enfant Plaza SW, more than 5,000 new artifacts and a whole lot of tech, now aims to be about the full field of intelligence — not just human intelligence, or spying.

Spy will begin selling tickets for the opening, on May 12, in the coming weeks, and will also be rolling out an online trivia game that will give people a chance to win tickets to its opening gala, to be held May 11. more