While the BES platform is nominally secure, I'm intrigued by one "interesting" fact about the design of the message routing system.

You see, although each organisation can run their own BES server in their own datacenter, all data packets sent from a Blackberry handset to their BES have to be routed through Blackberry's own routing infrastructure. Even if you're inside your own corporate LAN, sending an email to your own corporate Outlook server through your own corporate BES server. Your packets can't just go straight to your BES box - no, they have to go out through your firewall, all the way to the nearest Blackberry routing hub, back in through your firewall, and into your BES and from there to your mail server. Every. Single. Packet.

And while they're going through that Blackberry routing hub that you don't control, there could be any number of processes being performed on those packets. The skeptical might think that this infrastructure was set up precisely to facilitate massive eavesdropping by a company that has very close ties to the American military-industrial complex. (For example, by being one of the few smartphone companies able to get White House clearance).

By contrast, as I understand it, Microsoft smarphones of the mid-2000s era just sent packets dumbly to the nearest Outlook server, which meant that they didn't ever leave your organisational firewall.

Of course those Blackberry packets are encrypted on the handset before they hit the external Blackberry router that you can't see or control. Well, that's what Blackberry say, at least. The encryption is done in binary software on the device and there's no way for the user to check whether or not the encryption is fully compliant and contains no back doors. But they say it's encrypted and that they can't break it and that there are no secret proprietary backdoors in the secret proprietary code they install on all your device. So it must be secure.

Yes, the UK and her colonies were doing the spy game long before the USA, and taught them all their tricks; that's well documented. For example, see the career of William Stephenson from Canada in the inter-war years as he set up British Security Coordination and the OSS.

But it's my impression that at the same time, and particularly after the Tizard Mission of 1940 when the UK traded nuclear secrets to the USA for microwave tubes, the original balance of power - between the UK as the world's spymaster/banker and the USA as merely the "arsenal of democracy" producing the weapons - significantly tilted.

By 1944, at Bretton Woods, the US position had become so strong that they were able to overrule the British desire for a neutral Bank for International Settlements and designate the US dollar as the world's default currency for the entire post-war Western world order. This was no small policy defeat. The British Empire crumbled in the face of the war and the independence movements that followed, and the US became her creditor. American loans to the UK for WW2 expenses were only paid off by 2006, by the way.

So while I'm sure GCHQ remains nominally British, it's not the case the British interests are as separate from American ones as they were in 1939.

There's a reason why George Orwell snarkily demoted Great Britain to 'Airstrip One' of the Anglo-American alliance in 1948. It's been apparent for over fifty years where the world's military-intelligence center of gravity has shifted to since WW2, and where it remains. The 'Special Relationship' points in one direction - as the world saw demonstrated clearly with Tony Blair's increasingly bizarre and desperate kowtowing to Bush in the runup to Iraq in 2003. He had no obvious reason to obey Bush's demand for war, and yet. There it clearly was, the invisible leash around his neck with the other end in Washington.

You're right, the exact word used in the article is a "political objective" related to "finance" and not "commerce". My mistake.

There is of course absolutely no connection between engineering desired financial outcomes and commercial gain. All financial insitutions, and especially those related to the British Government, operate from a completely non-self-interested desire to make others nations rich.

I bet the foreign G20 heads using those netcafes and their Blackberrys were, yes. And they may be a little unhappy that this spying was done for apparently commercial gain and express this at the upcoming G8.

It's been widely suspected since the 1990s that the NSA and friends use their spying to enhance commercial contracts, but they've always denied this strongly. But now there's proof. That could also set a few chairs alight.

Also, perhaps, Blackberry is unhappy that their phone being hacked (or backdoored) has become known, with their reputation for security. World's most boring but secure smartphone, so uncrackable it's used by Obama himself, hated by the Saudis because they can't bug it, etc. This is not something they really want to become known, I think.

It used to be we'd read about the Russians pulling stunts like this in their embassy and we'd be all, 'oh, those wacky Soviets, we know they bug everything, they're so barbarous and uncivilised. In a proper country we're much more law-abiding.'

But, no.

You're really asking this?

It's been well known in public for many years -- certainly since 1996 when it was revealed in Nicky Hager's Secret Power ( the book which made ECHELON a household word, and is available here as a free ebook) that the NSA and its partner agencies in the UK, Canada, Australia and NZ work together as UKUSA or the 'Five Eyes' network, even to the point of agreeing to spy on each others' citizens to get around their respective domestic policy limitations.

Furthermore, it's also well known that a major GCHQ installation, Menwith Hill, is actually staffed by NSA officers. Similar American involvement is true for Australia's Pine Gap. To an unknown but probably lesser extent, New Zealand's GCSB listening stations at Tangimoana and Waihopai are also either staffed by, or run in close consultation with, the GCHQ and NSA.

National sovereignty? What's that? For those of us in non-USA English-speaking countries, the situation is strange. We're not American citizens, we have no vote for the US president or Joint Chief of Staffs, yet our leaders take their orders from your leaders. This means that we've all become very interested in American politics, even though we'd rather not. Because you guys in the State may think you're only electing your own local town mayor and dogcatchers, but you're actually choosing who will run the military and spy infrastructures of the whole Western world. And increasingly, the real power players in your system (the NSA, CIA and DoD) don't seem to even care much about the civilian 'oversight'. They just change the logos on the Powerpoints and keep on doing their thing.

For instance, there's a bill in the NZ Parliament at the moment to give our GCSB increased powers in order to synchronise them with the NSA. Did the New Zealand people really want this? No. But we're getting it anyway. Because the US military industrial complex calls the shots even in countries they have no official democratic authority over. But those who make and sell the guns, and control the wires, have a habit of getting what they want.

tldr: There is no independent 'GCHQ'. It's a subcontracted division of the NSA.

Well, if you're going to put it that way, I'm pretty sure that most of the bulk nitrogen, H2O and CO2 which come out of an internal combustion car's tailpipe are in fact in high demand as feedstocks for quite a lot of self-replicating nanobiochemical recycling units, or what we like to call in the business, 'plants'.

Care to recalculate the percentage of car exhaust emissions which is actually non-recyclable vs the amount of a Lithium-ion batttery that can be?

The Prius has an onboard Pressurised Water Reactor? No wonder it gets such good driving range.

atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed

And that's how the Borg got started. It's cheaper and more fun to jack your eyepiece directly into the holodeck than mess around with costumes and emitters.

So, um. This deadman switch will presumably not be in your house, otherwise it will get turned off when the snipers turn up. So it's up in the Cloud somewhere?

Which means you just uploaded the encryption key to your super-secret encrypted file to a server you don't control. And your ISP probably are mandated to keep packet logs of all your net traffic. So the government just talks to them, finds out the IP address of your remote server, talks to the hosting company, drops all the servers you host.. and there goes your deadman switch.

(Of course they can't guarantee that they find your deadman in time, but you can't guarantee that they can't. How good a gambler are you?)

That's nice. Now you get tortured to death and you can't even get them to stop it. And they walk away free because you don't even have the thing they think you have. Win-win, I guess?

I second, third and fourth this. Go read it right now. (Think, um... City of Amber meets Doctor Strangelove as told by George Orwell and Stephen King... and that's pretty much Wool. It's your basic "cosy catastrophe nuclear bunker last refuge of humanity ark" story. Only not cosy, at all.)

It's a heck of a read, and the premise is probably only a paranoid nightmare from a sick brain.

Probably.

But then I remember that actual people who thought themselves sane built nuclear weapons, were perfecty prepared to burn the entire world down to protect their ideology, and that those same kind of people still train to use them, and I throw up in my mouth a little.

... You mean like Mount Weather or Raven Rock?

Oh, I'm sorry, this is the persecution complex. Have a nice day, and don't go out that door- that's the Pit of 1,000 Youtube Commenters. Best you don't let them see you, they haven't been fed yet. Mind the chainsaws! Bye now! We'll be seeing you!

Well, they're probably a great source of oil.

And as long as you keep them chained up, avoid their whip-stings, and don't look at all those bright lights in the sky, I'm sure everything will be perfectly okay.

They have a tricorder? Well that's it. The gloves are off. Listen up everybody - we're going to a quadcorder.

Now that's just silly. Of course something mission-critical like a space probe won't be running PHP.

It'll be running jQuery on node.js.

what do you mean the latency from our data center on Pluto is lousy? look at the cost savings we get from the free cooling!

Unfortunately that chart doesn't work for any kind of ingested radioactive substance, and it's kind of disingenous for Randall to present it as if it's a meaningful comparison. There's plan radiation, and then there's radioactive contamination in dust, liquid or aerosol form, and the second one is the gift that keeps on giving.

IANAhealthphysicist, but I can read Wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure you get a lot more radiation damage to your cells if you eat or breathe in a radioactive particle than if you sit next to the same number of bequerels on the bench, because your body can incoporate the radioactive emitter directly into your cells for the entire rest of its (maximum of bioactive and radioactive) lifespan, and your skin won't screen out the alpha radiation like it does for an internal source. Iodine-equivalents are pretty nasty since although they have a half-life on the order of days, if they get inside you they dump all that radiation into your thyroid, which is not a good place to have it. Long-term, Radioactive strontium is the worst because it replaces calcium and so binds directly to your bone marrow, which is not good for leukemia. And potassium-equivalents are in the mid range, with a half-life on the order of months to years and they are bioavailable, but not permanently so. As far as we know.

Oh, and a lot of those last have been dumped into the ocean by Fukushima, and are now inside fish. Do they bioaccumulate up the food chain? We're not really sure, but we'll probably find out. It's a wonderful science experiment!

tldr: Don't eat, drink or breathe radioactive gunk. It's worse for you than it looks.