Lookout

Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies. By Gordon Corera. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 431 pages; £20.

IN 1996 John Perry Barlow, a computer activist who had once been a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, an attempt to capture the promise of openness and liberation that the young internet seemed to offer. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,” it began. “I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind…You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

To anyone familiar with the history of the computers that make the internet possible, it was an ironic idea. The modern computer came of age during the second world war. Colossus, a lumbering electromechanical contraption widely regarded as the first modern computer, was assembled at Bletchley Park, the headquarters of Britain’s vast wartime code-breaking operation. It was a machine built to spy and to break open German secrets. These days, with worries about mass surveillance, digital espionage and computer crime filling the papers, the...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1I5ILpM