"Maxinator", "Five Eyes"
Imagine being in the brainstorming session to come up with name for intelligence agencies alliances.
"It must sound dangerous, yes, but not evil. Like some kind of anti-villain"
back
6 comments
Maxinator was the name of the local beer they were drinking when they came out with the plan.
They should have drink Corona. The conspiracy level of the ‘Corona pact’ would have been off the charts.
There's no chance that they'd've been drinking Corona; if there's one thing that spies are known for it's a discerning taste in alcoholic beverages.
Oh you ain't heard of the Pabst Blue Ribbon alliance?
Actually there are some variations of corona which are quite ok. But I don't know if they are sold EU/Worldwide.
So it they had meet in Barcelona they might have ended up with that name (or more likely a tapas name ;)
Being familiar with the security industry, this does not surprise me at all. A lot of good work gets done over a beer.
“Metal Storm” is my favourite one. It’s the trademark for a company that produces an electrically controlled machine gun with an extraordinarily high rate of fire.
It’s also an incredibly good Nintendo game from 1991.
It's an extremely accurate name (and logo). The product is scary.
Conventional weapons can already do 4200 rounds per minute (ie 70 per second) at much higher accuracy and with much easier reloading. There just aren't that many cases where you need to shoot vast amounts of metal at something, even anti-missile guns don't need more than ~100 rounds to achieve satisfactory Pkill against anything but the most manoeuvrable targets. Most other engagements these days take place at a range where metal storm type weapons are ineffective.
Source: studied weapons engineering at Naval college.
It is but in my mind also kind of pointless. At 1600 barrels and 22000 rounds, you might as well lug around a bunch of RPGs, mortars and laser guided missiles.
Whenever I read about such organizations I always wonder who cleans the toilets. Whether they are real like the CIA, Five Eyes, or even Dr. Evil someone low down on the ladder has to get access.
Keep in mind that there are all sorts of odd circumstances and that the rules surrounding this stuff are necessarily inflexible, so there are lots of different arrangements.
That said, in the US, the janitor is probably a contractor. Typically ex-military, they have to pass a background check and are cleared to work in public spaces. When cleaning secure areas, they're escorted and watched.
And the people escorting and watching them are also escorted and watched. And their families are interviewed. Etc... It's a huge undertaking.
This is no different in the cryptography community in at least one of the countries in this arrangement. With the broad exception that they usually have to be on the payroll of the company to avoid conflicts of interest (if at a privately held company working for the government in this role). I'm not experienced with the government itself but I suspect no different.
In the US, the people doing the background checks are contractors too...
I believe Five Eyes is an agreement rather than an organization. No one works for Five Eyes itself. Consequently, there is no janitor.
Correct. Five-Eyes is just a info sharing agreement, in the same way that NATO is a military pact.
Even if you're assigned to a NATO joint command you're still paid by your country's military.
Even the folks who change the soda/snack machines need clearances to go inside certain buildings.
Here's your new 'eyes only' assignment, cleanup crew. Report for duty on Monday ...
I chuckled. Still, poop and urine can contain some useful information that may otherwise be difficult to get. Anecdotally, Kim is very careful as to where he poops.
As always, there's a relevant XKCD https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/
The easiest way to find manned Google data centres is to ask taxi drivers and pizza delivery people.
This goes back at least to the original "social engineering" that hackers used to do in the 80's.
In more recent decades, it was also a later well-publicized way that the press knew about the impending starts of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
That reminds me of how pizza deliveries in Washington increase when there is a "crisis" [1]. Maybe that's one of the things you were referring to.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clint...
Imagine being at the meeting where Peter picked Palantir.
He should have picked Fastly or Applifi instead
Maximator sounds pretty good with a french pronunciation
Did you read the linked article? It says that the name comes from the beer brand in its non-paywalled part.
Obviously the choice of name wasn't made by the beer. It must have sounded like a good name too. Homer Simpson's alias Max Power came from a hairdryer but that wasn't the point of it.