The commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WWII saw the opening of a museum of computing at the former site of the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) at Bletchley Park north of London. Following the publication of F.W. Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret in 1973, a number of documentary and fictional accounts of the work undertaken by GCCS appeared and provided the basis for a revisionist account of World War II reflecting prewar, wartime and post-war developments in cryptography and computing. This account contradicts many assumptions implicit in the established view of victory based around Churchillian 'Blood toil sweat & tears' plus the judicious use of operations research techniques. Instead it was revealed that at key points in the war allied commanders had access to German high command orders before their intended recipients, via a captured or purloined Enigma encoding machine. Immediate public reaction to Winterbotham's account of the availability of this Ultra material was 'why didn't we win war earlier?' to which former GCCS staff responded: 'We did !'

The existence of the Colossus electronic computer used to calculate settings on the Enigma machine was only revealed fully in 1975. Alan Turing, one of its key developers, was cast as the central heroic and eccentric genius. By the seventies, however, a range of successor projects already in the public realm had garnered the kudos of computing 'firsts.' Turing's fame had already been established as the 'father' of artificial intelligence through his formulation of a test to determine whether a machine was exhibiting intelligence. Despite his early suicide, his influence continued via Donald Michie, a former colleague and PhD student and the keeper of the flame of the AI project during dark post-Lighthill years in the U.K. when government support for such work was suspended for over a decade. In this respect Turing has been most widely influential in creating the popular (and misconceived) idea that computers are already capable of many of the objectives he set for them in the thirties and forties.

Fictionalised accounts of the work of Turing and his colleagues have emphasised a small group of boffins in a remote country house and the documentary accounts of survivors of the key groups at Blechley Park tell of inspirational breakthroughs by individuals and small teams. However, much of the site is still covered by the temporary and permanent buildings erected to house the 8,000 workers, many female, who made use of state-of-the-art business technology in the form of Hollerith tabulators and card indexes. The Enigma machine itself was a commercial product touted at pre-war trade shows and used by German state railways for commercial communications, as well as by the Wehrmacht.

The Taylorist organisation for the volume production of information from a vast range of intercepted messages contradicts the carefully cultivated image of lonely genius. The creation of massive databases of signals traffic and the development of increasingly sophisticated traffic analysis techniques, not the content of individual messages, led to many of the significant results produced. Given that Turing's famous test originally posited the ability to distinguish between male and female respondents via a teletype, and only then proposed the human versus machine distinction, the gender blindness of most accounts of Bletchley Park is significant. For example, it was a low ranking Wren who identified an imminent sortie by the Scharnhorst battle-cruiser on Xmas eve 1942, alerting the Admiralty and allowing its destruction.

Clive Ponting, in a review of a recent fictionalised account of work at Bletchley Park, cautions against the trend towards the glamourisation of intelligence. He argues that the Soviets had no access to Enigma, yet engaged 90% of German army for much of war, that a crucial black-out in North Atlantic data due to the addition of a fourth rotor to the naval Enigma machine in 1942 robbed the allies of access to data during the key period of the Battle of the Atlantic, which they still won. For him the key to victory was material superiority plus the immense causalities inflicted on and meted out by the Soviet Union. However, the recruitment of mathematicians from universities, particularly from Cambridge, meant that there were KGB agents in place at Bletchley who could verify the high quality of information when it was released selectively to the USSR, ensuring an appropriate response to it. Undoubtably Air Marshal Dowding's access to the Luftwaffe's daily orders for the Battle of Britain ahead of the German squadron commanders ensured that Russia was not facing Germany alone. Ponting's view is also Eurocentric. The advances made at GCCS were put to use in the Pacific, with one Special Liaison Unit to dispense Ultra information being located in Brisbane. The U.S. ability to break Japanese naval codes allowed them to engineer the key victory at Midway. The Hollywood version of the battle attributes the location of the Japanese task force to Nimitz's intuition. The U.S. National Security Agency claims that the Pacific war was shortened by one year through the defeat of Japanese military codes.

The problems of the ultra secrecy employed in the dissemination of Ultra data are demonstrated by the British complaint over the use of Ultra intelligence to intercept and destroy an aircraft carrying Yamamoto, the Japanese commander on a tour of inspection. Winterbotham describes the decision not to evacuate the city of Coventry ahead of a devastating air raid for fear of compromising the source of information. He also makes some indirect criticisms of U.S. General Mark Clark's Italian campaign and his use of Ultra data to which he had sole access in the theatre and describes how reliance on Ultra led other indicators to be discounted ahead of the Ardennes offensive of 1944.

Despite its internal dilemmas and the self-defeating aspects of the secrecy involved, the revisionist account derived from the Ultra story serves to legitimate the massive infrastructure developed by the GCHQ, successor to GCCS, and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States. Key personnel from Bletchley Park played a leading role in the post-war development of electronic computing, both at Manchester University in Britain and in the MIT Whirlwind project in the U.S. In 1952 the NSA emerged from comparable origins to GCCS as the Signals Intelligence Service in Arlington Hall, Virginia. The continuing role of the signals intelligence community at the cutting-edge of computing developments in the post war period ensures that the information economy is inseparable from the surveillance state.

The NSA promoted joint development with IBM of second generation general computers with features such as the high speed tape drives, prominent in every sixties movie featuring computers. They also sponsored the first Cray supercomputers. This pioneering work continues with the Special Processing laboratory, established in 1990 for in-house fabrication of highly specialised micro-electronic devices The end of the Cold War and the dual nature of the NSA's mission statement (publicly available on the World Wide Web) which distinguishes between external foreign signals intelligence and 'classified and unclassified national security systems' has allowed NSA to promote their own Clipper encryption chip as the answer to commercial security on the information superhighway. In one respect the NSA are returning technologies distantly descended from a German commercial patent to the civilian world.

Joint development and commercial programs provide a direct link between military and diplomatic concerns and the world of commerce. Despite measuring its computing resources in acreage, the NSA outsources data processing to commercial organisations such as TRW, as illustrated in the film 'The Falcon and the Snowman.' Significantly TRW is primarily a credit data agency. Yet another link between military and commercial projects is through technique. The continued refinement of signals traffic analysis has led to the emergence of what Roger Clarke terms 'dataveillance.' Both governments and private organisations like TRW are able to assemble revealing pictures of organisations and individuals through the correlation of individually trivial data.

The defeated combatants of World War II faced different futures. As members of NATO, Italy was incorporated into the western alliance, with a divided Germany providing a front line state for each bloc in the Cold War. Japan, as a relatively demilitarised buffer against China was free to put its intelligence ingenuity into commercial organisations such as the Nomura Institute. In this context it is not surprising that there are signs that the U.S. signals intelligence community has from time to time acted in support of U.S. commercial interests.

In some ways the end of the Cold War has simply confirmed the blurring of distinctions between military and civil categories of computer-based surveillance. The narratives derived from wartime experience provide momentum to this process.

Some Suggested Reading

Clarke R. (1989) 'Information Technology and Dataveillance' Communications of the ACM 31 (5), May 1989, pp.498-512.

Dunlop C. & Kling R. (1990) Computerization and Controversy: value conflicts & social choices Academic Press, Boston.

Hinsley F.H. & Stripp A. (1993) Codebreakers: the inside story of Bletchley Park Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Ponting C. (1995) 'The Imitation Game: Enigma by Robert Harris' New Statesman & Society 1 Sept 1995, p.33.

Welchman G. (1982) The Hut Six story: breaking the Enigma codes McGraw-Hill, New York.

Winterbotham F.W. (1974) The Ultra Secret Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London.