The more things change, the more they stay the same. Two recent events in East Africa – one tumultuous, one expected – have highlighted that despite surface-level change, there is often much less change than expected or hoped. Political stagnation, or worse, going backwards, needs to be challenged in order for countries to reach their […]

As has been discussed at length elsewhere in these pieces, it is getting easier and easier to make false representation, take advantage of ‘fake news’ or simply to hope for the best and pretend to be a reputable company or individual on the assumption that nobody will bother to check otherwise. KCS is seeing a

The honey trap was a Cold War classic. A glamorous woman would approach a gentleman of interest and, through flattery and charm, harvest as much information as possible – including some very specific intelligence. Today’s modern world merely sees the trap move online. Plus ca change… It has long been established that the Internet is

In New York of the 1930s, the Brooklyn Bridge was sold twice a week. Standard going price: $55,000. The seller was one George Parker, an extraordinarily successful conman, who managed to sell the Bridge to dozens of naïve and easily manipulated Americans, in addition to running scams involving several of America’s noted landmarks. Sadly, the

The world may be moving to ‘the cloud’: heralded as the ultimate repository for data and ease of access in the modern age. However as the latest leak from the Pentagon has showed, the cloud is just as susceptible to security flaws as other methods. 100GB of data was left on a public Amazon cloud

I would like us all to try something a little unusual today, if only as a sort of thought experiment to help cut out some of the noise we have been constantly being bombarded with on a daily basis over the last year or two. Put to one side the mainstream media and politicians’ rants

Russia is currently facing multiple allegations of interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, but it now seems that the state has been doing far more behind the scenes, with the exposure of a “troll factory” that sees agents attempt to force the narrative of political events to their own ends. Social media has allowed

Saudi Arabia is in the news again, and not always for the right reasons. Already in the middle of a war of words with Iran, and in proxy conflict with Qatar, the internal security of the country was broken this week with a sudden crackdown necessitating the arrest of eleven princes and political figures. The

An old expression of the 1900s was ‘Quel Panama’: essentially, what a disaster. The first attempt to cut the Panama Canal went so badly, with hundreds of deaths, that the expression was used to derogatorily refer to things that seemed impossible to fix. The latest revelations concerning the offshore Caribbean habits of the rich and