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Short abstract

This paper recovers the hidden labour histories of GPO engineers who worked at the analogue-digital interface in Britain's wartime intelligence infrastructure. Drawing on archival materials, I argue understanding intelligence infrastructure requires theorising adversarial sociotechnical relations.

Long abstract

When we discuss Britain's WWII intelligence success, we credit radar technology, brilliant cryptanalysts, and organisational innovation. But what about the 10,000 General Post Office engineers who installed and maintained 30,000 miles of telephone cables connecting radar stations to Fighter Command? Their labour made "the system" work—yet they remain invisible in historical accounts.

This paper recovers the hidden labour histories of GPO engineers who worked at the analogue-digital interface in Britain's wartime intelligence infrastructure. Drawing on archival materials, I show how these telecommunications workers installed cable networks under bombing, maintained connections under wartime conditions, and adapted existing analogue infrastructure to carry digital radar signals. Their skilled practices—improvisation, repair, continuous maintenance—constituted what intelligence historians treat as "technological capability."

Building on Shapin's concept of "invisible technicians," I argue that understanding intelligence infrastructure requires theorising adversarial sociotechnical relations. Unlike cooperative Large Technical Systems, adversarial systems are characterised by strategic exploitation through shared infrastructure, where success depends on both hiding capabilities from adversaries and maintaining them through labour. This creates a double invisibility: workers must be hidden from enemies and are subsequently erased from histories privileging technology and elites.

This matters because contemporary cybersecurity debates systematically erase infrastructure workers—system administrators, network engineers—whose expertise makes security systems function. Recovering historical labour reveals patterns persisting from radar to cyberspace.

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Short abstract

In this talk I examine how security research has challenged previously stable interfaces between hardware and software, and argue that the concept of interface work may offer resources for reasoning about the implications.

Long abstract

In this talk I examine how security research has challenged previously stable interfaces between hardware and software, and argue that the concept of interface work may offer resources for reasoning about the implications.

The abstractions specified in instruction set architectures and memory standards define core functional interfaces on which software work depends, enabling analogue hardware to be treated as implementing specific digital functionality. The material properties of semiconductor hardware make direct scrutiny difficult, and details of the hardware design are often concealed for commercial purposes. Reasoning about computation thus conventionally rests on assumptions that standards and specifications accurately represent the functional properties of the hardware. However, in the 2010s security research into disturbance errors and transient execution vividly demonstrated that the functionality that hardware offers to a creative programmer is not reliably constrained by specification. Exploiting these vulnerabilities can entail the implementation of ‘weird machines’ with computational capacities that transgress those intended (Dullien 2017).

I go back to classic work on information hiding, and David Parnas’s characterisation of modularity in terms of ‘responsibility assignment’ (1972, Colburn and Shute 2011), and Melvin Conway’s observations of emergent homomorphism between social organisation and software architecture (1968). If computer science and software engineering understood interfaces in terms of intended divisions of labour, recent vulnerability research pushes us to question the power of the designer to define what interfaces are possible. Adversarial interface work, then, is a set of social processes that explores the possibility space for adversarial agency, increasingly crucial for security today.

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Short abstract

WMD treaties must constantly navigate a ‘verification trap’ in which states simultaneously want to access and restrict information to assess treaty compliance. Digital-analogue data interfaces present opportunities and challenges for those wanting to escape the verification trap.

Long abstract

This paper describes the interfaces between analogue and digital systems in weapons of mass destruction (WMD) treaty verification, and how they represent opportunities and challenges to global arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation. It argues that WMD treaty verification – that is, systems for confirming compliance and / or detecting non-compliance – is perceived as essential to effective treaties but is difficult to achieve in practice, since it must balance a need for high-quality information against requirements to protect military and commercial secrets, whilst remaining cost-effective. Treaties must therefore navigate the possibility that verification becomes a political trap: indispensable yet impossible, and thus a means for bad-faith actors to stall WMD arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation.

Benchmark treaties – developed during the Cold War – resolved such trade-offs through complex analogue verification arrangements which restrict what information can be used, how it can be collected, and who can be involved. This paper considers how digital ecosystems disrupt these arrangements: on the one hand, digital tools and technologies enable more people to access and make sense of more data that could help meet information needs, on the other hand, they risk undermining the carefully-negotiated compromises that allow treaties to function.

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Short abstract

The paper outlines a project proposal aimed at examining the influence of changing security dynamics and threat perceptions on the design of digital infrastructures through a case study of the standardization practices of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).

Long abstract

Digital infrastructures have become foundational to political, social, and economic life in the European Union (EU). Far from being neutral tools, they play a constitutive role in contemporary societies. Today, the rule of law, and core political values are no longer enforced solely through legal text and institutions, but increasingly through technical architectures. In times of digital constitutionalism, constitutional principles do not merely regulate digital technologies but are operationalized through code, protocols, and standards. At the same time, shifting geopolitical security dynamics are transforming how digital infrastructures are imagined: from enablers of openness and integration to strategic assets requiring resilience and control.

Against this backdrop, the project investigates how evolving security dynamics shape the technical design of digital infrastructures. How do threat perceptions influence the value systems embedded in the classification systems of technical standards? What trade-offs emerge between freedom, privacy, security, and state control? And how are changing imaginaries of international order translated into technical specifications?

The project develops a conceptual framework that bridges digital constitutionalism and science and technology studies, foregrounding technical standardization as a key site where constitutional values materialize. It focuses on standardization processes at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), a central arena in which value-laden classification systems become embedded in binding technical norms. Through an in-depth case study of ETSI’s standard-setting practices, the project traces how security concerns are translated into concrete design choices that shape digital infrastructures across Europe.

(Note: Contribution to the workshop format)

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Short abstract

This article explores how state actors have influenced the emerging field of post-quantum cryptography (PQC), and how the future of PQC has been anticipated and co-constructed by state and corporate actors as a result.

Long abstract

This paper investigates the standardisation of post-quantum cryptography at the global level. While expected to bring fundamental breakthroughs in various fields, the advent of large-scale quantum computers has been a major source of concern for governments worldwide, as they could break the most common cryptographic systems currently in use. Since the mid-2015s, these concerns led to the emergence of a new field of research known as post-quantum cryptography (PQC). The initial rise of PQC being driven primarily by state-led efforts, this research looks at the capabilities of different governments to direct, or nudge, the standardisation of post-quantum encryption at the global level. This research focuses in particular on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a global industry-driven standard body, where corporate and state actors negotiate and compete over the formulation of Internet standards. This research draws on a research fieldwork carried out in the IETF between 2023 and 2025, which comprised participant observation and sixteen semi-structured interviews with PQC experts. Studying specific controversies in the IETF reveals the mechanisms through which state actors (such as the U.S and Germany) assert their 'digital sovereignty' in relation to the Internet industry, through direct or indirect means. This article discusses how state actors have influenced the emerging field of post-quantum cryptography, and how the future of PQC has been anticipated and co-constructed by state and corporate actors as a result.

Keywords: State power, standardisation, Internet, encryption, anticipations.