[security-news] Bulletin #9 - October 28, 2002

[security-news-admin at lists.resist.ca]

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Security-news <security-news at resist.ca>
A security bulletin for autonomous resistance movements
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October 28th, 2002

There are weeks when activism seems more of a challenge and these last 
few have been some of those for us here at security-news which is why we 
weren't able to put last week's bulletin out and there's no how-to in 
this edition. As usual we are asking that those of you with security 
experience, ideas and expertise please email us with tips, how-tos, 
articles and suggestions at secure at resist.ca - it really helps to have 
input!

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Security-news: Issue #9 - Contents
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* Security tip of the week: Surveillance and Society - Issue 1 
* News & Analysis:  PGP 8.0 BETA Release
* News & Analysis: Infiltration of the British Left from the 60s-80s

*****
Security Tip of the Week: Surveillance and Society - Issue 1
*****

So this is less of a tip than a "check this out" - a new academic 
journal called Surveillance and Society - all articles from the first 
issue are available online at  http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/, 
and make for some interesting reading. The site will apparently also 
have a discussion forum running to follow-up on articles published in 
the journal. And while we're on the topic of society and surveillance, 
also check out the Minnesota Public Radio page and radio series on the 
Surveillance Society at 
http://news.mpr.org/features/199911/15_newsroom_privacy/ - they have 
some really interesting stuff posted there too!


*****
News & Analysis: PGP 8.0 BETA Released - PGP reborn makes its pitch for 
the mainstream
October 22, 2002
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/27729.htm
*****

Encryption products need to become as easy and transparent to use as AV
software packages. 

That's the goal of Phil Dunkelberger, President and CEO of PGP
Corporation, who's over in London this week for the European launch of
the newly-formed company. 

PGP Corporation was created to market PGP Desktop and Wireless 
encryption products bought from Network Associates back in August. The 
deal ended month of speculation over the future of the technology 
following Network Associates' decision to mothball it back in March. 

Network Associates canned development of PGP after failing to
commercialise the package, which is well known to security conscious
individuals. NAI said commercial sales were affected by the perception 
of PGP as a freeware only product. 

PGP Corporation can succeed where NAI failed by being more focused on 
the development of the package, Dunkelberger told us. He added that NAI 
was always more focused on its McAfee antivirus and Sniffer network
monitoring tools, whereas PGP Corporation's goal is to bring innovation
to encryption. 

Earlier this month, the beta of version 8 of PGP became available. This
brought support for Mac OS X and (crucially) windows XP. 

Integration with Lotus Notes (thanks to a server-side plug in) is much
improved with this rev of the product, which is due for release later
this quarter. 

The source code of PGP 8.0 will be made available at that time, allowing
cryptographers (including PGP inventor Phil Zimmermann, who does some
consulting work for PGP Corporation) to review the security of the
product. This is an important point, made more significant by
Zimmermann's dispute with NAI (when it still owned PGP) over backing 
away from this commitment. 

In the first five days after making the beta available the software was
downloaded 300,000 times, according to PGP Corporation. 

With PGP 8.0 there been a concerted effort to make the software easier 
to manage and administer. As well as the enterprise package, they'll 
also be PGP Personal, targeted at small business and individual 
commercial users and a freeware version for non-commercial use (to be 
made available from the PGP Web site). 

Dunkelberger acknowledged factors like ease of us, deployment,
manageability and the cost of rollout have held back the use of
encryption products and hurt Public Key Infrastructure vendors. 

Going forward, transparency of use and manageability will be a focus for
PGP Corporation's development efforts. Dunkelberger pledged to deliver
these benefits in the first half of next year. 

That's a bold claim. 

For the last five years, if not longer, we've heard claims that next 
year will be the year PKI technology goes mainstream. Every year we've 
been disappointed. 

Maybe, just maybe 2003 will finally see this promise fulfilled. 

Security-news note: This means having PGP for OS X finally on the way! 
We have installed this on our OS X-running macs and have had no problems 
integrating, openings and using pgp key files and pgp disks that we had 
created using PGP 6.5 under the "Classic" Mac OS. Of course, this is 
just a *beta* which means it hasn't been fully tested yet - so exercise 
caution. 


*****
News & Analysis: Infiltration of the British Left from the 60s-80s
Inside Job 
Wednesday October 23, 2002 The Guardian 
*****

When Dan joined the Metropolitan police special branch in 1964, he was
astonished when a senior officer warned that it was "quite likely that 
in 10 years Britain could become a Communist state". The new police 
recruits were being introduced to the subversive agenda of the Communist 
party of Great Britain, the prototype "enemy within". Its intention, 
they were told, was to use the trade unions as a revolutionary 
instrument to undermine parliamentary democracy. "It felt as if you were 
paddling in a pool of subversion," Dan says. Soon the pool deepened as 
the Vietnam war radicalised thousands of young people and swelled the 
ranks of Trotskyite organisations. 

The climax came in 1968, when tens of thousands marched on Grosvenor
Square and laid siege to the American embassy. The ensuing violence
between police and demonstrators had never been seen before on British
streets. The police were completely unprepared. They had no training and
weren't given any detailed briefing on what was likely to happen.
Intelligence on the marchers' intentions was rudimentary. 

For the Metropolitan police, Grosvenor Square was a wake-up call. 
Special branch needed to rethink its intelligence-gathering techniques. 
Sources within the revolutionary left who'd traditionally passed on the 
odd titbit in return for a few pounds and a pint simply weren't enough. 
As a result, an elite unit was set up within special branch whose 
existence has been kept a closely guarded secret until now. It was known 
as the "special demonstration squad" - or less prosaically as the 
"hairies" because of the way its officers dressed, looked and lived. "It 
was a shadowy section of the branch where people disappeared into a 
black hole for several years," says Richard, a veteran hairy. 

Members of the squad adopted new identities, or "legends", lived away
from their families in grotty flats, took real jobs as cover and
gradually infiltrated the hard left. Later, when the hard right also
became a growing public order problem, there were skinhead hairies with
rather less hair. Wilf, who became one of the hairy handlers - a contact
point in the outside world - had great respect for his undercover
colleagues. "They were true spies. What the SAS did for the army, the
hairies did for special branch." 

Sometimes MI5 was also a recipient of the political intelligence they
gleaned. "Occasionally somebody from MI5 would come to a meeting and 
ask, either individually or generally, if anybody could help with the 
identity of a photograph," says Brian. 

As most police officers at the time sported short back and sides, 
certain adjustments had to be made to fit their new personae. Brian says 
he looked "outrageous with shoulder-length hair and bushy beard six 
inches beneath the chin". Geoff had a problem because his hair was so 
fine, so he went to hairdressers and had a perm. "I ended up looking 
like Marc Bolan - big hair!" 

Dan was "slightly dirty and slightly smelly". Richard was a long-haired,
shabby manual worker with dirty jeans and boots. "I made sure my
fingernails were always dirty and cracked." On one occasion, the
Metropolitan police commissioner was taken to a secret location to meet
the hairies. He clearly wasn't ready for what he saw. "I've never seen a
person more flabbergasted in my life," says Geoff. "You could see his 
jaw dropping lower and lower. I think he could see his knighthood
disappearing out of the window." 

Each hairy worked out his own legend and memorised. Richard had just 
read The Day of the Jackal and decided to adopt a new persona like 
Frederick Forsyth's assassin who assumed the identity of someone who had 
died young. "I spent weeks and weeks at St Catherine's House studying 
birth and death records. I was looking for child who'd been born about 
the same time as myself and died soon after. I found him and resurrected 
him."

Richard visited the town where the boy who was providing his cover was
born - and from which the family had conveniently moved away - and
researched every detail of the family's history. 

Being a hairy was nerve-wracking and dangerous. Infiltrating the Troops
Out Movement, with its Irish republican connections (as Brian did) or 
the Anti-H Block campaign (as other hairies did), or working on the 
fringes of terrorist organisations such as the Angry Brigade or the Free 
Wales Army was a high-risk and potentially life-threatening operation. 

There's no doubt that most hairies believed that the organisations they
penetrated were genuinely subversive, however dismissive of the notion 
we may be today. "They were interested in seizing power, and not by
parliamentary means. They saw the police and army as tools of the state
to be defeated and overthrown," says Geoff. 

Geoff and his colleagues found that infiltrating these organisations was
relatively easy. They would go along to meetings, look interested and
gradually be drawn in. The groups were hungry for new recruits. Dan
infiltrated the International Marxist Group (IMG) as the Vietnam war
raged. Brian infiltrated the Troops Out Movement in the early days of 
the Irish conflict. Richard joined the Socialist Workers Party at the 
time of the Falklands. Hairies were never pushy and would wait to be 
approached so that the initiative always appeared to lie with the 
so-called subversives. 

They became experts in dialectical materialism and the different
ideologies of the far left. Some even confessed they became so involved
they almost went native. And they made very good friends, many of them
women. But sex was strictly off-limits. "They were nice people but
wrong," says Geoff. 

Once inside the organisations, they could gradually work their way up
because they were prepared to do the boring jobs. They rose to become
membership secretaries, treasurers and trusted comrades with access to
the vital records that MI5 was interested in. Some admit they could have
been almost running the organisation, but that was strictly taboo. "As a
rule of thumb, you could allow yourself to run with the organisation,"
says Richard, "but you had to stop short of organising or directing it." 

Street cred could also enhance a hairy's cover. At one demonstration
Geoff, who had also infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party, had an
altercation with a police officer. "Seeing me with my long hair and
beard, he grabbed me in a vice-like grip and started to pummel and drag
me towards a police vehicle. So I grabbed hold of one particular part of
his anatomy and squeezed it rather hard which made him leap up and
release me. I legged it and everybody thought I was a hero of the 
working class." 

On one occasion, Geoff found himself collecting money for the Anti-Nazi
League next to the young Peter Hain at the huge Rock Against Racism
concert in London's Victoria Park in 1978. "I can remember sitting next
to him on a large sack of cash. There was money everywhere. We had to 
get Securicor to take it back to ANL headquarters." Hain had no idea who 
his fellow collector was. Nor did he know that this wasn't the first 
time he'd been sitting next to a hairy. 

During the Stop the 70 Tour campaign, which first brought Hain to
national prominence in 1970, a hairy called Mike was virtually Hain's
second-in-command. Special branch had targeted the campaign after
warnings that there was likely to be "blood on the streets". Mike has
since died but his handler, Wilf, is still very much alive. "I don't
think Hain ever realised he had a hairy as his number two," he says. 

Mike provided the intelligence that enabled the police to deal with the
disruption planned for a big rugby game between the Springboks and the
Barbarians at Twickenham. The demonstrators planned to throw smoke bombs
and metal tacks onto the pitch, but thanks to Mike the police were ready
with sand and electric magnets. News film of the time clearly shows them
being used. There was the inevitable inquest into how the plan had been
thwarted. "Hain felt, quite rightly, that there was a spy in their
midst," says Wilf. "Mike looked down the room at one poor devil and 
said: 'I think it's him!' He was thrown out and Mike survived. Bless 
him." 

On occasions, the hairies were of more practical use to MI5 in helping
provide covert access to premises where the all-important membership
lists and financial records were stored. Dan, who'd infiltrated the
fringes of the IMG, spent a few evenings baby-sitting the offices of the
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, an offshoot of the IMG. The bunch of keys 
he was given also contained the keys to other IMG premises - he copied 
them. The offices, he says, were subsequently "visited", presumably by 
MI5 who normally did burglaries. 

When I told Tariq Ali about what had happened to his keys (at the time 
he was editor of the IMG's paper, Black Dwarf) he was almost lost for 
words as he searched to remember who the hairy could possibly have been. 
"It's quite amazing. It's a betrayal. He must have been trusted to have 
had a key to that office. He must have been liked and must have made 
friends."

But Dan has no regrets about what he did. "There was always a policeman
within me, so I didn't have a problem about exposing people if
necessary." All the hairies agree. Betrayal was part of the job
description. 

Whereas most thrived on the adrenalin-pumping work, in the end Dan found
the strain too great, not least because of the eternal fear of being
compromised. The final straw came in a pub. He'd been tipped off as the
result of a telephone tap on the IMG warning that Dan had come under
suspicion. He was taken to a pub where he had to drink nine pints of 
beer under intense questioning from his comrades. Remarkably, his cover 
held. "My thought processes remained ice-cold," he says. The ordeal 
over, he staggered off to meet his handler. "That's when my legs 
collapsed." By then, Dan had decided that enough was enough. "It took a 
huge toll on my family life. On reflection, I didn't enjoy it." 

But most hairies felt very differently. "It was the best job I ever did
in my police service," says Geoff. "It was salaried schizophrenia but I
think we did prevent serious disorder on the streets of London and even
stopped innocent people being killed. But I think our major role was to
stop people from trying to short circuit parliamentary democracy and,
yes, perhaps overthrowing the government. I'm very proud of what we 
did." 

Not surprisingly, those on the receiving end take a different view. Ali
is appalled at the revelation. "That's the undemocratic nature of the
intelligence agencies," he says. "The state is defending itself against
its own democratic citizenry. In order to do so, it has to disregard 
some of the democratic values it believes in." He still can't believe 
that it happened. But it did. 


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