British Inter Departmental

BID badge "BID / 50/1 " on a British Portex cipher machine

British Inter Departmental ( German  about " British interdepartmental" or " Inter-Disciplinary " , short: BID ) is an English technical term that is used to identify systems or devices that are usually cross-resort, i.e. by more than just one government agency be used. It is mostly only used in its abbreviated form BID as a prefix together with a number , for example for device names, which are known as the so-called BID designator ( German  "BID identification" ).

Examples are the cipher BID / 30 (5-UCO), BID / 50 (Portex) and BID / 60 (singlet).

The authority responsible for assigning the BID numbers is the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) , which in turn is part of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) , i.e. the British secret service.

Web links

• Jerry Proc's Crypto Machine Menu Page , containing a list of BID numbers from 20 to 4000, accessed May 19, 2017.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Crypto Machine Menu Page by Jerry Proc, accessed on May 19, 2017.
2. ↑ Glossary of the CryptoMuseum (English), accessed on May 19, 2017.