NSA plans to FREE YOUR DATA with range of cloud services, analytics

'Why pay providers to store or analyse your stuff? We've already done it'

Of course we have an office arc furnace. And our stationery cupboard is a TEMPEST-standard Faraday cage, too.

We were following this protocol recently to decrypt a message we had received. However before the office junior could even begin to manually key in the code of our in-house developed, guaranteed safe decryption program - let alone manually keying in the ciphertext** - the blank machine self-activated a hidden software/hardware monitoring/tracking/communications package which had evidently been placed inside it as a matter of routine at some point during the manufacturing and logistic chains. Upsettingly, the package worked even through the walls of our TEMPEST-standard office Faraday cage and stationery cupboard, where we do all our decryption: we later discovered that a covert ultrasonic through-metal communications rig had previously been emplaced on a building structural member.

The embedded surveillance module in our blank machine had been remotely activated by our source for this story, a long-time Register reader now working as a sysadmin at GCHQ - Britain's answer to the NSA. He used this method merely to establish his bona fides: subsequently we communicated using almost any piece of networked equipment, as our source assured us that our discussion of classified matters, though it would of course be intercepted, would be flagged up by GCHQ's analytical machinery only to him. ®

Bootnotes

*Any records or notes that may be necessary are kept fully re-encrypted, written in longhand and concealed by a complex steganographic procedure, on photocombustible parchment kept in a deep subterranean vault located in a non-compliant jurisdiction.

We generally access our secret files by sending one of our boyfriends or girlfriends on an international flight. (Unlike some, our boyfriends and girlfriends all receive training in various exotic but useful Oriental techniques, including a mnemonic methodology allowing them to store large volumes of information in their unconscious minds such that they can only recall it in a fugue state triggered by a secret codeword known only to the editor of the Register and the abbot of our overseas archive facility).

Glad to have cleared that up.

**This turned out to be merely some humdrum revelations regarding the CEO of a major digital advertising platform and an unsavoury incident in his private combination menagerie and specialised undergarment wardrobe.