
Operation Vula - Garbage
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/12/operation_vula.html
======
mikro2nd
"Ronnie" would most likely be Ronnie Kasrils
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Kasrils](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Kasrils)).

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twic
False. It's Ronnie Press:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/yclsa-eom-
forum/QhQl...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/yclsa-eom-
forum/QhQl0XBSOwE)

It's not too hard to google up more documents about Dr Press and this whole
business - well worth reading. This is a long interview with Tim Jenkin, one
of the ANC's other technical boffins in the UK:

[http://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/cis/omalley/OMalleyWeb/...](http://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/cis/omalley/OMalleyWeb/03lv00017/04lv00344/05lv01405/06lv01415.htm)

Which contains this striking passage:

> Our concern became how do you run and how do you operate an underground war
> by remote control without any contact with your soldiers? It's like running
> a war with no communications and no-one's ever won a war like that. The
> prime weapon in any war is your communications. [...] so we bought into it
> and started using computers from the early eighties. By today's standards
> these were hardly computers but you could type things on them and you could
> print them out and you could ultimately produce publications. It was a big
> step forward and I was in it right from the beginning. The PC itself came on
> the market in 1982 I think it was so right from that time when the first PCs
> became available. In those days computers couldn't really do an awful lot.
> You'd have a word processor and that's all it could do for that moment while
> you were running the word processor. So if you wanted to do anything else
> you had to learn how to programme it yourself.

> We got into that, learnt how to programme these things and immediately we
> could see this application. Whereas before we'd done all this coding by
> hand, adding numbers together and doing all kinds of strange things with
> books and so on, why not get the computer to do this. You type in your
> message and it's done and you press a button and it enciphers the thing and
> produces a string of non-readable characters.

We're all used to the idea that there is a secret history of World War II
fought by geeks in huts in Bletchley Park, Bawdsey Manor, etc. Somehow it
still comes as a revelation to me that there was a similar technical strand in
the struggle for liberation in South Africa. And it does make me laugh that it
was fought from bases in Bristol Polytechnic and a flat in Camden. The
compiler is mightier than the AK-47!

~~~
mikro2nd
Thanks for the correction.

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userbinator
First read that as "Operation _Vulva_ ". Oops.

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FuckFrankie
Read between the lines. Schneider's message is both hopeful and concerning.

