Comments on: Now you CD it, now you don’t

By: Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:45:54 +0000

SoRB, I can absolutely believe that story about Bletchley. I had the privilege of going there with my godmother who’d worked there. She was fascinating and fun, telling us about clambering in and out of the huts via the windows because the doors had stiffened up in the damp. Did she breathe a word about what she did there? Did she buggery.

Z, that’s another story I can believe. As I have frequently said, that was an heroic generation, and we shall not see their like again.

There’s a trite comment in Systems Theory, Reed, that if you cut an elephant in half, you don’t get two smaller elephants instead you get a great big bloody mess. It works the other way too.

Aphra.

By: Reed

Reed — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 22:25:18 +0000

What made me particularly incadescent was Darling’s remark that the failure was nothing to do with the cobbling together of the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise, and the resulting massive job cuts. Ohh, yes. Nothing at all. It’s not as if low morale, loss of experienced staff, and sudden massive change to infrastructure and proceedures could in the least leave some poor tomfool goit floundering about buggering things up. Noooo, that’s never happened.

Gah.

By: Z

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 20:08:47 +0000

I met a man at my cousin’s wedding who had been a spy in the second world war. He never even told his wife what he did in the war until he was offically allowed to.

Now that’s security.

By: SonofRojBlake

SonofRojBlake — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 18:42:01 +0000

You don’t need me to tell you this, probably, but I shall anyway… The code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park is now a museum, set up relatively recently. It tells the story of what happened there during the war, the incredibly secret and secure work that was done there by those 10,000 people standing behind Alan Turing and the world’s first proper computer.

And they actually had a lot of trouble setting up the museum. Not for want of money. Not for want of planning permission. Not even for want of materials. The problem they had was they kept going to try to interview the people who worked there, people in their sixties, seventies and eighties, people who had not even been in the same county as Bletchley Park in DECADES. And these people simply wouldn’t talk. The security culture had been embedded in them so strongly that in many, many cases, they simply refused to talk, in the 1990s, about work that had been secret in the 1940s.

Now THAT is a security culture.