Ultimo pezzo di uno special report dell'Economist su intelligence e tecnologia. <http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21709773-who-benefiting-more-cy...> “THE COMPUTER WAS born to spy,” says Gordon Corera, who covers intelligence for the BBC, Britain’s national broadcaster. The earliest computers, including Colossus and SEAC, were used by signals intelligence (known as SIGINT) in Britain and America to help break codes. But computers also happen to have become supremely good at storing information. Searching a database is a lot easier than searching shelves of files like those compiled by the East German secret police, the Stasi—which stretched for 100km. The job used to be to discover what a hostile country was up to by attaching crocodile clips to telephone lines emerging from its embassy, intercepting communications, collecting data and decrypting them. It was an industrial process. Breaking code was laborious, but once you had succeeded, the results endured. “Twenty years ago we had a stable target, a stately pace of new technology and point-to-point communications,” says a senior intelligence officer. Cryptography evolved slowly, so “when you cracked a code it could last from ten to 30 years.” The internet changed everything. Roughly $3.4trn a year is being invested in networked computers, phones, infrastructure and software. The pace is set by businesses, not spooks. Individual packets of data no longer travel on a dedicated phone line but take the route that is most convenient at that instant, blurring the distinction between foreign and domestic communications. Signal intelligence used to be hard to get hold of. Today it gushes in torrents. The trick is to make sense of it. [] Gli altri pezzi dello Special report. * Shaken and stirred <http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21709778-intelligence-services-...> * Standard operating procedure <http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21709776-how-war-terror-turned-...> * You’re US government property <http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21709772-edward-snowden-villain...> * Happenstance and enemy action <http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21709777-western-intelligence-a...> * The solace of the law <http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21709775-blueprint-intelligence...>