Spycatcher
The former assistant director of MI5 offers an account of British Intelligence, including his work on the Ring of Five and exposing Soviet espionage and the conspiracy to oust Harold Wilson from the office of Prime Minister in the 1970s
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7recommend
44mentions
24people
2009–2026years
32% recommend64% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "The Thing" Requires a mandatory mention [0]. Same principles and same designer.
It was a very sophisticated covert listening device (bug) for its time that went undetected for a long time. It did not have a conventional power source such as a battery or mains connection.
My first intro to this was the fascinating book The SpyCatcher.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
- the comment is being downvoted because its central premise is preposterous: the BBC lied about vetted people for MI5 30 years ago -> therefore it's a lying propaganda institution -> therefore it should be disbanded
first of all, even if MI5 vetting for this kind of thing wasn't a completely reasonable precaution--read Spycatcher if you don't know why--do you think the BBC had a choice in matters?
second, this was 30 years ago.
third, if we're going to just disband any institution that's silently beholden to MI5, you may as well abandon the whole country.
fourth, the BBC makes a metric tonne of fantastic content enjoyed by people all over the world, and yet somehow it should be disbanded for trying to keep soviet spies out over 30 years ago?
people just love to hate the BBC, egged on by the cowardly, self-interested right-wing media, and it's just sad, because it's genuinely one of the truly great things about the country. it's our greatest artistic cultural achievement by a long distance
- read Spycatcher. in the post-war/cold war era, Britain, particularly the upper classes, was fucking riddled with soviet agents, mostly British-born communist sympathisers who were activated by the USSR, and many of them could have been stopped from doing huge damage if simple vetting had been in place
this isn't mccarthyite nonsense, this isn't right-wing hatred for communism. I am a socialist. this is the absolute fact that a foreign power was actively, successfully pushing agents into positions in the establishment all over the country. do you think it's a coincidence the vetting stopped when the soviet union collapsed?
>The BBC commissions some great content from great creators - as do all British TV channels. If you look at what the BBC itself does, there's a lot of bad there.
do you genuinely believe that ITV, Dave, Channel 5, Sky, etc are producing or have ever produced content on par with the BBC?
Channel 4 is the only other channel that can even remotely compete, and I would imagine they too would have been equally under MI5's thumb if they'd been important enough to warrant it. going further, do you really think that any British TV channel would have spoken out if MI5 came to them and told them they needed to vet their employees as a matter of national security? even further, has any organisation ever done that in the history of MI5? in the global history of spy agencies?
- Peter Wright's book (Spycatcher) about his (story of his) adventures reverse engineering the thing is a good read.
He had another trick of using simple phasing to make cocktail party type problems easier for analysts. Just play it out of phase in each ear and the brain works it out apparently.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_RAFTER another sneaky one (highly recommend the book spycatcher, really unique perspective in that the author was a proper engineer on the frontline in the cold war)
- Read "Spycatcher" by Peter Wright. It's one of not many books on spying like this (Wright was cleaning up the mess Venona revealed for years) actually written by an intelligence officer, in clear breach of the official secrets act, and even better he was an engineer too so there are lots of tales of him reverse engineering soviet bugs like "The thing" and tracking down spurious radio emissions to find spies.
His theory about Roger Hollis is probably lost to time although MI5's complete failure to address it is probably a hint.
