During and immediately after World War One, British cryptography efforts were spread throughout a number of different departments. The Army (MI1b); the Navy (NID25, also known as Room 40) They competed for personnel and resources and official favor. They hated each other.

I’m reminded of this, reading Bruce Sterling’s excellent analysis of U.S. attempts to deal with “cybersecurity,” a messy process still in the early stages of developing an infrastructure, which Bruce characterizes thusly: ”A power struggle has been brewing over who should be in charge of national cybersecurity: the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security, the military, or the private sector.”

My primary knowledge about the power struggles that shaped the UK’s Government Code and Cypher School (later Government Communications Headquarters) is derived from my obsession with Alan Turing, who was employed at the GCCS’s main decryption headquarters at Bletchley Park.

The two efforts (pre-World-War-Two British cryptoanalysis and contemporary frantic “cyber-security” scramblings) have some fascinating parallels. They both derived from staggering new technological developments that completely re-shaped the nature of warfare, tossing out the old playbook and pitting entrenched political and military interests against energetic young upstarts, creating opportunities for radical revision. These periodic inversions appeal to the queer anarchist and the community organizer in me, because they create that rare window in which the script is flipped and power dynamics can be meaningfully messed with. How else did someone like Alan Turing, an awkward and delightful little homo who got tossed out of the military once for parsing the wording of a direct order, end up leading a department whose pioneering work “is credited with having shortened the war by two years”? How else did he get the recognition and respect that would get his ideas about machine intelligence taken seriously?

More importantly, these messy interventions create crucibles of knowledge and perspective, where a bunch of different ideas and experiences collide around very specific and challenging problems, and that’s the kind of primordial soup of technological creativity that led to the creation of much of our contemporary communications network. Including, you know, those things Turing sorta invented - what are they called - oh, right - computers. And that other military communications effort. The internet.

And then again it’s entirely possible that I’m being naive and optimistic. That this chaos of corporate and military and political posturing is simply an “almighty mess,” like Bruce says it is, and that you and I are simply “cyberwar cannon fodder for keyboard-punching apparatchiks that you’ll never see.”

But I’m hoping we’ll get something good out of this.

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