Sigint in Fiction

The conflation of SIGINT and cryptology makes me doubt the writer's understanding of the field. While cryptography and cryptanalysis have long been important to the field, they are but one aspect. I won't offer a meaningless percentage as to how important they are, but consider the importance of a) traffic analysis and b) meta-data: There are plenty of historical examples of operational decisions being made on the basis of traffic analysis and there is the oft-quoted Michael Hayden's "we kill people based on metadata".

(Then there is my favourite WWII nit: The focus on Enigma, which, while undoubtedly important, pales in comparison to Tunny. The fact that Flowers could build essentially a general purpose computer to crack a cipher based only on its apparent properties is heads-and-shoulders and all other superlatives above Enigma, for which GCHQ had working examples throughout the war. I am not downplaying the importance of the Enigma cryptanalysis work, merely suggesting that Tunny was, in the end, and strategically, far more valuable, especially once telephone communications became harder for OKW.)

Ian McEwan's "The Innocent," and less known, "The Imitation Game" have sigint plots, and a few of his novels have spy agency themes without falling into the trap of being genre fiction. Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" was an obvious one as well.

when I travelled in some literary circles, they were always on the edge of the bureaucracy via public funding bodies, universities, or foundations, where you were just above the fold, and so you didn't talk about intelligence stuff because everyone had gone to school with someone who was at this or that agency, and making a point of not talking about it was a social signal. I suspect this is why the material on sigint in fiction isn't nearly as rich as they all seemed to affect to know.

it was ironic, as actually being a civilian in security where at least half my colleagues had military experience with CV gaps for "travel," and who over drinks might casually recognize someone's loudly striped tie as resembling a burn bag, or whose partners had implausible jobs and hobbies, where literally all of our threat assessment work included what would come to be known via snowden as bullrun- we talked about that stuff all the time.

maybe it's more of a plot device these days. I sort of gave up reading fiction when sensitivity readers became a thing because investing time in novels became less appealing. perhaps all these filter bubbles and AI slops will create a new rennaisance in fiction as people search to experience the pleasure of some authentic art again.

> A key point, I feel, is that it is impossible to describe the process of cryptanalysis in a work of fiction and make it interesting for the general reader.

Neal Stephenson pulled it off in Cryptonomicon.

In William Gibson's latest novel, "Agency", there is an underlying theme of the newly emergent AI being able to evade the eavesdropping of the corporation that spawned her. Later, she cooks up an unbreakable secure comms tech for the human beings in her network.

As well, in the part of the novel that takes place in the future, evading SIGINT plays a significant part of the story, as well.

Note: "The Peripheral" is the novel that precedes "Agency", so it would be best to read it first, to better grok the world WG builds. I highly recommend all his books.

There are others besides the ones that the author mentions. Some that come to mind:

1. The Gold Bug (E.A. Poe) 2. Enigma (R. Harris) 3. Cryptonomicon (N. Stephenson)

In the comments however it appears that the author meant specifically British fiction.

The Innocent (McEwan novel)

> The novel takes place in 1955–56 Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War and centres on the joint CIA/MI6 Operation Gold, to build a tunnel from the American sector of Berlin into the Russian sector to tap phone lines of the Soviet High Command. Leonard Marnham is a 25-year-old Englishman who sets up and repairs the tape recorders used in the tunnel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innocent_(McEwan_novel)

> Perhaps the process of cryptanalysis is of limited interest to the reader of a novel because the process of Sigint – interception, analysis, cryptanalysis – is analogous (though less interesting) to having somebody physically steal a copy of the message.

Active adversarial SIGINT fits the analogy of "stealing a copy of a message", sure.

Passive mass SIGINT is something entirely different, though. It's hard to even come up with an analogy that doesn't invoke some kind of magic.

Imagine, for example, if paper mail were exchanged using locked safes instead of paper envelopes — safes that all have thousand-digit combinations that nobody's going to ever brute-force. But, deep within USPS, there exists a machine that can clone these safes, without opening them — a very literal black-box operation. USPS takes these cloned safes and stores them all in a warehouse. And then, one day, the NSA manages to figure out a vulnerability in the manufacture of one model of safe, that allows them to crack open all of that type of safe. So, suddenly, they have access to millions of pieces of mail people have sent over years/decades.

See? This analogy isn't even helpful. Can someone come up with something better?