[HN Gopher] Sigint in Fiction
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Sigint in Fiction
Author : _tk_
Score : 23 points
Date : 2025-03-09 10:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (siginthistorian.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (siginthistorian.blogspot.com)
| MrMcCall wrote:
| In William Gibson's latest novel, "Agency", there is an
| underlying theme of the newly emergent AI being able to evade the
| eavesdropping of the corporation that spawned her. Later, she
| cooks up an unbreakable secure comms tech for the human beings in
| her network.
|
| As well, in the part of the novel that takes place in the future,
| evading SIGINT plays a significant part of the story, as well.
|
| Note: "The Peripheral" is the novel that precedes "Agency", so it
| would be best to read it first, to better grok the world WG
| builds. I highly recommend all his books.
| derefr wrote:
| > Perhaps the process of cryptanalysis is of limited interest to
| the reader of a novel because the process of Sigint -
| interception, analysis, cryptanalysis - is analogous (though less
| interesting) to having somebody physically steal a copy of the
| message.
|
| Active adversarial SIGINT fits the analogy of "stealing a copy of
| a message", sure.
|
| Passive mass SIGINT is something entirely different, though. It's
| hard to even come up with an analogy that doesn't invoke some
| kind of magic.
|
| Imagine, for example, if paper mail were exchanged using locked
| safes instead of paper envelopes -- safes that all have thousand-
| digit combinations that nobody's going to ever brute-force. But,
| deep within USPS, there exists a machine that can clone these
| safes, without opening them -- a very literal black-box
| operation. USPS takes these cloned safes and stores them all in a
| warehouse. And then, one day, the NSA manages to figure out a
| vulnerability in the manufacture of one model of safe, that
| allows them to crack open _all_ of that type of safe. So,
| suddenly, they have access to millions of pieces of mail people
| have sent over years /decades.
|
| See? This analogy isn't even helpful. Can someone come up with
| something better?
| staplung wrote:
| There are others besides the ones that the author mentions. Some
| that come to mind:
|
| 1. The Gold Bug (E.A. Poe) 2. Enigma (R. Harris) 3. Cryptonomicon
| (N. Stephenson)
|
| In the comments however it appears that the author meant
| specifically _British_ fiction.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| The Innocent (McEwan novel)
|
| > The novel takes place in 1955-56 Berlin at the beginning of the
| Cold War and centres on the joint CIA/MI6 Operation Gold, to
| build a tunnel from the American sector of Berlin into the
| Russian sector to tap phone lines of the Soviet High Command.
| Leonard Marnham is a 25-year-old Englishman who sets up and
| repairs the tape recorders used in the tunnel.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innocent_(McEwan_novel)
| motohagiography wrote:
| Ian McEwan's "The Innocent," and less known, "The Imitation Game"
| have sigint plots, and a few of his novels have spy agency themes
| without falling into the trap of being genre fiction.
| Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" was an obvious one as well.
|
| when I travelled in some literary circles, they were always on
| the edge of the bureaucracy via public funding bodies,
| universities, or foundations, where you were just above the fold,
| and so you didn't talk about intelligence stuff because everyone
| had gone to school with someone who was at this or that agency,
| and making a point of not talking about it was a social signal. I
| suspect this is why the material on sigint in fiction isn't
| nearly as rich as they all seemed to affect to know.
|
| it was ironic, as actually being a civilian in security where at
| least half my colleagues had military experience with CV gaps for
| "travel," and who over drinks might casually recognize someone's
| loudly striped tie as resembling a burn bag, or whose partners
| had implausible jobs and hobbies, where literally all of our
| threat assessment work included what would come to be known via
| snowden as bullrun- we talked about that stuff all the time.
|
| maybe it's more of a plot device these days. I sort of gave up
| reading fiction when sensitivity readers became a thing because
| investing time in novels became less appealing. perhaps all these
| filter bubbles and AI slops will create a new rennaisance in
| fiction as people search to experience the pleasure of some
| authentic art again.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| > A key point, I feel, is that it is impossible to describe the
| process of cryptanalysis in a work of fiction and make it
| interesting for the general reader.
|
| Neal Stephenson pulled it off in Cryptonomicon.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Great example! Although I'm having trouble thinking of other
| examples that aren't by the same author. An exception to the
| rule?
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| The conflation of SIGINT and cryptology makes me doubt the
| writer's understanding of the field. While cryptography and
| cryptanalysis have long been important to the field, they are but
| one aspect. I won't offer a meaningless percentage as to how
| important they are, but consider the importance of a) traffic
| analysis and b) meta-data: There are plenty of historical
| examples of operational decisions being made on the basis of
| traffic analysis and there is the oft-quoted Michael Hayden's "we
| kill people based on metadata".
|
| (Then there is my favourite WWII nit: The focus on Enigma, which,
| while undoubtedly important, pales in comparison to Tunny. The
| fact that Flowers could build essentially a general purpose
| computer to crack a cipher based only on its apparent properties
| is heads-and-shoulders and all other superlatives above Enigma,
| for which GCHQ had working examples throughout the war. I am not
| downplaying the importance of the Enigma cryptanalysis work,
| merely suggesting that Tunny was, in the end, and strategically,
| far more valuable, especially once telephone communications
| became harder for OKW.)
| sorokod wrote:
| > The conflation of SIGINT and cryptology makes me doubt the
| writer's understanding of the field.
|
| ELINT is one of the two pillars of SIGINT, the other one being
| COMINT. Some aspects of COMINT involve crypto analysis. The
| author seems to be unaware of any of this.
| WillAdams wrote:
| A good example of the importance of traffic analysis and meta-
| data is:
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/prism-metadata-analysis...
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