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Comment by SiempreViernes | Hacker News Reader

"The details of this algorithm were shared by the BND within Maximator with TIVC. This enabled the Dutch to read Argentinian naval and diplomatic communications before the war started. As reported by Aldrich and Wiebes, the British SIGINT organisation GCHQ had neglected Argentina. It was not able to read communications secured by Crypto AG devices. When the war started, it asked, under pressure, countries on the European continent for help. A directly involved Dutch source states that at that stage a specialist from TIVC travelled to GCHQ and explained how the HC500 Crypto AG devices for Argentinian naval and diplomatic communications worked; subsequent solution of the ciphers was left to GCHQ itself."

Nice going GCHQ!

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This reads like GCHQ was the naughty kid, not paying attention, and they took pity on them when they asked for help ... but at least they asked. But to rub it in they did a "the solution is left as an exercise for the reader" deal. Kinda hilarious.

That was my read as well.

That said, you could spin it another way: the UK had enough good will and political capital to lean on its European neighbors for a bare-minimum amount of help. "We can tell you how it works, but it's on you to figure the rest out".

Naughty kid not paying attention is also relevant -- you've only got so many hours in the day and so many hours to map out threats. This was still the Cold War and nuclear holocaust was a bigger priority than distant Latin American dictatorship.

I think it's about plausible deniability. If they only told gchq about the design of the algorithms, they're not saying they know how to break them or even that they're designed to be breakable.

It sounds like the solution was always left as an exercise for the reader in the day-to-day dealings of the group even among the members: "Each participating country was supposed to perform its own decryptions. This is common practice in the intelligence community in order to prevent being fed cooked-up information." and "The cryptanalytical part of the cooperation involved exchanges of algorithms used in various (deliberately weakened) cryptographic devices used by target countries. It was then left up to the Maximator participants themselves to find out how to exploit weaknesses in the algorithms of these devices. Such exploitations are also called ‘solutions’."

It's interesting how many strings Britain was able to pull to get advantages in the Falklands War. It also was reported [0] that Thatcher convinced the French to hand over IFF codes that would effectively prevent Argentina's French-made Exocet missiles from targeting British ships. The war might have gone very differently if Argentina was the one with powerful diplomatic connections.

Yes, both France and the Netherlands are broadly aligned with the UK, and would fight alongside them in the case of any existential threat. But for colonial wars one might think they'd be happy to see Britain get some egg on her face.

[0] I'll just link to skeptics.se here, where the accepted answer is that the evidence does not completely support this, but there are plenty of links for more reading https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/can-exoce...

> Yes, both France and the Netherlands are broadly aligned with the UK, and would fight alongside them in the case of any existential threat. But for colonial wars one might think they'd be happy to see Britain get some egg on her face.

Any “friend” who won’t help with small things is a lot less likely to help when it really matters. And the Dutch and French both also have possessions in the New World full of people perfectly happy with the status quo who deserve protection from would be conquerors.

According to this source (perhaps not completely credible) she called then French President Mitterrand and threatened to nuke Argentina if he did not give her the codes

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/22/books.france

Argentina ordered 15 Super-Etendards and AM39 Exocets from France. They received 5 of each, with 1 plane used for parts. The Sheffield was destroyed with one exocet, and 2 sank the Atlantic Conveyor (with most of the Army's supplies and helicopters.) An AM38 sank the Glamorgan.

Looks like the IFF info didn't help.

(Had either of the British carriers Hermes or Invincible been sunk, Britain would have retreated.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocet#Falklands_War

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