My colleague in the Security Group at Cambridge (David Chisnall) recently sent around a link to an article highlighting some of the historic failings of MI5.

The description of the internment of Iraqi students at the start of the first Gulf war, jogged my memory about a rather bizarre experience I had when doing work experience at Warwick University around this time.

Whilst the majority of my time was spent either as a gopher or avoiding being a gopher. One day I was asked to assist with opening the office of a Iraqi academic who’d been missing without trace for a couple of weeks.

On entering his office myself and a couple of technicians were greeted be a 4-5 foot Perspex dome with electronics stuffed inside it and things poking out. To me it looked fairly innocuously – rather like a gigantic turtle robot for programming with LOGO. But it worried people enough that I was whisked away and slightly panicked staff locked the office up and went of to raise the alarm.

I like to think that considerable effort was spent investigating what it was.