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The rise of social media means it's now easy to glean personal information.

Then & now: open secrets

Surveillance data was analysed in much the same way in the past as it is done in today's social-media-savvy world, writes Jason Wordie

Widespread public concerns have arisen in recent years about official hacking of private information. Unsettling revelations about personal-data storage emerged during the WikiLeaks scandals and erupted again after the American National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden surfaced in Hong Kong.

Very little personal information requires a serious search to find these days; the sheer volume of online incontinence spawned by Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and so on offers an embarrassment of freely divulged information to metadata miners, whether official, commercial or - as increasingly seems to be the case - an unholy nexus of both.

But how was information-gathering, dissemination and general surveillance done in the past? Seventy-two years ago in Hong Kong, at about 4.45am on December 8, 1941, Major Charles Boxer, the British intelligence chief, was listening to the Japanese radio news, broadcast on short wave from Tokyo. Inserted into the weather bulletin was a brief and, on the surface innocuous, sentence - " " ("East wind, rain") - a coded signal for Japanese forces poised across East Asia to attack.

British intelligence chief Charles Boxer.
Other codes slated for inclusion according to need were " " ("North wind, cloudy"), which signified a diplomatic break with the Soviet Union, and " " ("West wind, clear"), which indicated a Thai diplomatic break with Britain and a pre-emptive invasion of Thailand by Japanese forces. It went out, as they say in the trade, ("in clear"). Hidden in plain sight, the Pacific war had begun. Then as now, the most secretive acts are orchestrated in the public gaze, in broad daylight.

Half an hour after Boxer relayed the message to China Command headquarters, Japanese forces crossed the frontier from Shum Chun (Shenzhen) and, three hours later, bombers flew down from Canton (Guangzhou) to bomb Kai Tak airfield. As far as Hong Kong was concerned, the war had started.

Across the Pacific, Hawaii's Pearl Harbor had already been attacked, troop landings in Malaya were imminent, and Singapore and the American airfields in the Philippines were bombed.

These top-secret Japanese codes had been broken some time before in Bletchley Park, Britain and a top-secret codebreaking unit based at Stonecutters Island, which dealt with Japanese and German joint codes, had been operating in Hong Kong since at least 1938. Accordingly, there was little element of real surprise in the Japanese attacks across the Far East, whatever later generations of conspiracy theorists might wish to believe.

But how would lower-level surveillance occur? Much like today, watch lists were formed of suspect individuals and their movements noted. Complex probability algorithms indicated what to look at in terms of their routine communications, and what to leave alone. For example - a letter posted locally on the first of the month in a utility company envelope, along with thousands of others, probably only contained a telephone or electricity bill, and would only be looked at if the addressee was on a known watch-list. Conversely, a personal letter sent after the outbreak of the European war, in 1939, to someone with a Germanic-sounding surname at an address in a neutral territory (for example, Portuguese-controlled Mozambique or Timor) would be inspected by Allied censors and the contents noted, even if both sender and addressee were otherwise unknown.

It is much the same today. A WhatsApp group message notifying friends about a Friday night rave-up in Central would probably not show up on any complex digital algorithm - but a curiously worded e-mail to a previously unused Central Asian address probably would attract attention.

 

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Open secrets
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