[…] be required. Mission-critical systems: defense attempting to address major software challenges (27 pp.) GAO/IMTEC-93-13, December 1992. Billions of dollars in defense weapons and command, control, communications and intelligence systems depend on high-performance, correctly functioning real-time computer systems capable of withstanding severe stresses without failing. This report identifies the many software problems affecting weapons and […]
[…] more dense, more difficult in places and more depressing than it did in isolated essays. The underlying message is clear and alarming: if governments give military- or intelligence agency-sponsored scientists large amounts of money and no political control they will eventually come up with technologies with which to control the behaviour and thinking of […]
Greg Philo and David Miller Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 2001, £16.99 I asked the publisher for this on the basis of the title and the authors: Greg Philo has written many books for the Glasgow University Media Group (Bad News, More Bad News etc.) and David Miller is the author of Don’t Mention the … Read more
[…] claimed to be confidential briefings “off the record”. The real reason which could not be told publicly for our entry to the common market was because our intelligence service had learned the Soviet Unions had plans to invade Western Europe and these would be carried out once the trade unions in Western Europe led […]
[…] him by launching the largest private sector political warfare campaign in history against him. But there are other factors. For an American politician, getting embroiled with the intelligence services or the military looks almost uniquely dangerous. There are also two more general reasons for the inertia. The Democrats are reluctant to criticise America, domestically […]
[…] it could not be won on the basis of anything less than a massive deployment of troops well beyond what was politically acceptable. This was Ellsberg’s human intelligence, as opposed to the ‘Humint’ variety of wishful thinking the president’s men were peddling. But presidents down the line were continually presented with wishful thinking from […]
[…] decline. Most of all, the UK is no longer a world military power but merely a cash-strapped proxy for the US, dependent upon US weapons systems and intelligence from the US-dominated global surveillance system. (I don’t take seriously recent newspapers stories about the UK creating a defensive missile screen and building – or acquiring […]
[…] the U.S.’s many covert and overt anti-Soviet operations of the 1980s. As you might expect with the author’s track record of accepting what the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services tell him, there is no consideration – none; not a line – of the massive critiques of the KGB-done-it thesis by Edward Herman and others […]
[…] the ‘dirty tricks’ attributed to the ‘political soldiers’. He denies all the charges and his explanation for the hostility is that as head of the ‘Security and Intelligence Department’ (of which Barrett was briefly a member), he played a prominent part in the disciplinary tribunals of those suspended or expelled, with concomitant legal action […]
[…] a camera with a long lens can seem like a gun as it is pointed over a wall. The chances are that he was working for British Intelligence.’ Geraghty forthrightly condemns the Heath Government’s hard line policy, providing the fascinating detail that senior ministers had urged ‘an unlawful “shoot-to-kill” policy’ on the Army, but […]
