Podcast Nuggets Episode 8

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Time to spoil the ears again with another selection of podcast nuggets from across the Internet. We start with a man who knows the Soviet Union inside out. Next, a stupendously dangerous extortion that ends spectacular, how to catch a most damaging spy in your own ranks and finally the struggle between government and public for right to digital privacy.

COLD WAR CONVERSATIONS - A UK Journalist in the Soviet Union & the GDR is an interview with Mark Brayne who studied in 1972 two years in Moscow and traveled around Russia. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1974 as Reuters reporter and befriended Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear scientist who eventually became a Soviet dissident. After Russia he became correspondent for Reuters in East Berlin and later for BBC in Beijing and the BBC World Service. Also listen to Brayne under Stasi Surveillance and his Reporting the 1989 Romanian Revolution. So many fascinating stories about the many people Brayne got to know. The interview show notes contain photos and videos of Brayne's trips.

DAMN INTERESTING - The Zero-Armed Bandit brings the stunning story of  John Birges who lost a lot of money in Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino. He got the brilliant idea to extort three million dollars from the casino by planting a 1000 pounds dynamite bombe in Harvey's Resort Hotel. The bombe had a complex tamper-proof detonation mechanism and once the ransom was paid, Birges would provide the instructions to disarm the bombe. He warned the FBI not to disarm the bombe but they decided to let the bombe technicians have a go at it.

SPYCAST - Cuban Intelligence and the Ana Montes Spy Case interview with Scott Carmichael, a senior counterintelligence investigator of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Carmichael was the man who identified Ana Belen Montes, one of the most damaging spies in recent U.S. history. Montes joined the DIA in 1985 and quickly became a rising star and later DIA's most senior and distinguished Cuba analyst. In reality, she worked for the Cuban intelligence service.

DARKNET DIARIES - Crypto Wars Jack Rhysider talks with Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the well known non-profit digital rights group. For many decades, cryptography was in the hands of governments and their military. That changes in the 1980s when the Internet arrived and ordinairy people began to use cryptography to protect their communications and data. Since then, governments have tried to restrict or weaken publicly available encryption.