The Hindu Business Line : Sedate truths about secure communication

What did the high-security RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) use before switching to VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal)? Telegraph messages, and STD, using the common user circuits provided by DoT (Department of Telecom), explains Maj Gen V.K. Singh in India’s External Intelligence ( www.manaspublications.com).

“The Telegraph Act of 1885 forbade other agencies from having their own telephone and telegraph lines… Until very recently, even the Army had to depend on the DoT for its static communication network, and it was only in forward areas that it could construct its own cable routes.” The senior functionaries in headquarters and foreign missions had desktop encryption devices, which provided medium grade security.

RAW’s telecom division’s main tasks were communication and interception. It used to be claimed, one learns, that “90 per cent of the intelligence gathered by RAW was from technical means, with the human element providing the balance 10 per cent.”

Crypto staff did the code breaking while the cipher personnel encoded and decoded RAW’s own messages, describes the author. “Messages were physically carried from the signal centre to the cipher wing, which was on a different floor. This naturally resulted in delays, which could have been avoided if they had been co-located.”

Another problem was that there was no way of ensuring priority for important messages. “Almost every message was being graded secret and being given the highest priority. This put an unnecessary load on the cipher staff and also increased the time for transmission… No one seemed to be perturbed if a message was delayed, even for two or three days.”

Perturbing account.

System failure

Venue: Lester B. Pearson Airport. Gate 107. June 22, 6:10 pm (EDT). “The boarding security was extraordinarily tough for the times. Passengers were first frisked under the watchful eyes of the Mounties and Burns Security while passing through the door-frame metal detector…” Thus narrate Salim Jiwa and Donald J. Hauka in Margin of Terror ( www.jaicobooks.com).

“Furthermore, the airline, sensitive to the threat of terrorism, was also using a ‘security numbers’ system to make sure that all the passengers who had checked in were actually boarding the flight. The point was to make sure that passengers who had checked in had boarded their flights and not just their bags.”

The system worked except in one case: a bag from Vancouver that had arrived without a passenger. “Kanishka was now ready for takeoff… As it lifted off for the short haul to Montreal before embarking on its long journey to New Delhi via London, the plane was carrying 270 passengers, 22 crew, and hundreds of pieces of luggage… The aircraft was still carrying the bag whose owner, M. Singh, had never showed up.”

Riveting read.

Second life

It is in Jerusalem that chapter forty-three of The Last Testament by Sam Bourne ( www.harpercollins.com) opens. There is this Maggie, troubled by a sinking feeling. Kyon? “Their phone calls were bugged, they were being followed and, it seemed, her work on Shimon Guttman’s computer had been watched. Someone, somewhere, was probably reading this right now…”

So, Maggie slips out of the room, and tiptoes down the corridor, “heading for rooms that all hotels maintained even though, in the era of the BlackBerry and wi-fi, hardly anybody used them any more: the Business Centre.”

Entering it with her keycard, Maggie finds the single, forlorn terminal in the dark, empty, and cold room. “It worked, asking for her room number and nothing else. That was OK: hotel staff could see what she was doing, it was just the electronic eavesdroppers, hackers and Peeping Toms she wanted to avoid.”

A few keystrokes later, there is this message: ‘Welcome to Second Life, Lola’… Then? “A computer-generated landscape began to fill the screen, as if to herald the start of a video game. In the foreground… was a CGI-version of a lithe young woman wearing tight jeans and a Union Jack bratop. This, Maggie realised, was Lola Hepburn, Liz’s embodiment in Second Life, her ‘avatar’…”

Good escape!

World in our living room

“Tribalised cultures privilege the society over its members while de-tribalised cultures fragment the social whole and foreground the single, detached individual,” reads a snatch in ‘Communication and technology’, a chapter in Media and Communication by Paddy Scannell ( www.sagepublications.com). Thankfully, “Electronic media retribalise (resocialise) the world into a single global village.”

The author compares the electronic media to “the neural network of the cerebral cortex: an immensely complex, single structure of interlinking nodes that create, for the first time in history, instant, live connectivity between any two points or more on the globe.”

So much so, we have the world in our living room, watching sporting and ceremonial events and news stories of global significance. “Television today is intimately linked to global politics, business and war. Through television, cultural narratives, images, songs and jokes circulate round the world.”

Key players in the revolution have been broadband cable and satellite, which now deliver “down the wires, interference-free, high quality reception of hundreds of channels.” While these technological innovations fulfilled McLuhan’s 1960s vision of ‘the new electronic age’, the final fulfilment, according to Scannell came with the Internet and the Web.

Well-researched.

Consultant matching

Independent consultants, free agents and interim managers are transforming the field of work, say Marion McGovern and Dennis Russell in A New Brand of Expertise ( www.elsevier.com). In a chapter on channelling sales, they talk about two types of sites, viz. vendor matching, and consultant matching. The former type offers B2B services, and includes a professional services component. Thus, “while you shop for telecommunications equipment or lease financing, you can also secure business consulting services.” In contrast, the consultant matching sites offer “content of interest to individual free agents regarding taxes, legal issues, and mobile computing. They have a project matching service that enables clients to post projects that can then be matched to your expertise.”

Handy guidance.

Tailpiece

“My new mobile is big enough…”

“To be called a computer?”

“Plus, it has space for carrying my old phone!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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