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Sigint in Fiction

Sigint in Fiction

2 comments

·March 9, 2025
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derefr

> 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?

MrMcCall

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.