R. A. Ratcliff

There is much good about this book, but I do have a few caveats.

First, the author (a woman, btw, not a man as posited in a previous review) was funded for her research, in part, by the NSA and she has published in their journal and taught at their intelligence school. I think this biases what she can say. Whether if biases what she wants to say or not, I'm not sure.

Second, this was written after 9/11 but before the Snowdon leaks, so it's mostly focused on how the US might better defeat the "bad guys," than the central government being the bad guy.

The third point is that some of this book was previously published (and I suspect used as lecture notes). The author hasn't done a very good editing job and sections of the book are extremely repetitious. (Perhaps this was at the behest of the NSA, since they wouldn't have to re-vet material that hadn't been changed??)

Her main thesis is that the Allies, and in particular Britain, were successful at breaking German codes and protecting their own because they put together a spectacular engineering project which combined the skills and dedication of a huge number of people to not only participate in the work, but to keep it secret. The German culture (military, academic and Nazi) did not provide a conducive climate to assemble such a project, nor did they deem it necessary (perhaps because they saw themselves as on the offensive, rather than needing every resource for defense).

Things she doesn't say but that were clear to me:

- if your intelligence is divided into sub-groups that don't talk to each other, you are not going to get good intelligence. I'm not sure that Homeland Security has digested that one yet. (Perhaps because they are fighting an offensive war and don't see the need???)

- to keep a huge engineering project a secret you have to convince people that the project is vitally necessary for their lives and the lives of the people they love. This was much easier to do in Britain under the blitz, than in the US under the threat of terrorist attacks that are only happening very rarely in large cities. It's especially hard if you have people who start questioning whether your methods are worth the results. (The Bletchley Park people knew they were helping to prevent bombings and working to get vital supplies across the ocean.)

An interesting book for anyone interested in cryptography or large, successful engineering projects.… (mere)

This is one of those books where the sub-title says it all, as the author considers how the German military allowed the advantage it gained by adopting the Enigma cyphering system (allowing for fast, encrypted communication) become a liability to be exploited by the Allies. To Ratcliff this is largely due to social factors, and not simply the obvious liabilities of the Nazi regime. The bottom line is that German officer corps could not transcend its cliquish and guild-like sensibility to recruit the sort of varied civilian talent that the British collected at Bletchley Park. Then there is the issue of how German military's natural tendency to specialized compartmentalization negated the prospect that cypher security could be addressed as a joint issue, and crack open the attitude that Enigma was invincible. Overarching all this was the German "short war" fixation, which tended to blunt an interest in collecting strategic intelligence, even if Hitler had encouraged his military high command to take an interest in strategic matters.

While it could be argued that Ratcliff then sets up the Anglo-American intelligence effort as too much of a peerless machine, the fact is that London and Washington took the issues at hand seriously, devoted serious effort to solving them, and did not fall into complacency during the course of the war.

This then leads to the weakest section of the book, as Ratcliff spends a short amount of time musing on the liabilities that face the contemporary world, which depends on good cryptology simply to conduct day-to-day business. The question that is begged is cryptology for whom? Secure communications for citizens seeking to conduct their private affairs, or intrusion for governments operating on presumptions of guilt for all so as to maintain the image of control and "security" at all costs. To be fair to Ratcliff, he asserts that he does not believe in "absolute security," and is mostly thinking in terms of how a new Bletchley Park might be needed in the future. Excuse me for being cynical, but my assumption is that governments will find it more expedient to simply negate freedom and confine the general public to a regulated box (enabled by the rise of the data utility designed to keep you in thrall to a given manufacturer's closed monopoly); at least that would seem to be the trend.… (mere)