Secrets
It has been said that the First World War was the chemists’ war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time, and that the Second World War was the physicists’ war, because the atom bomb was detonated. Similarly, it has been argued that the Third World War would be the mathematicians’ war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war — information.
Privacy
We all have secrets, skeletons in our closet and communication with others we don’t want to be public. We have conversations with others and with ourselves that we don’t want anyone to hear or see. We can mask our emotions with our faces and hide our true thoughts with words. We keep locked diaries, locked safes and secret hiding spots.
We have pseudonyms, disguises, bugs, wires, hidden cameras, fake voices, hidden passageways, and secret agents.
As communication (and perception/technology) has grown substantially so has the need to keep it private. Imagine a future where computers can translate the electrical signals in our brains and know what we’re thinking? Is that something you want public? (Social media aside, where seemingly everyone already pours out their entire stream of thoughts onto the web for everyone to see).
Codemakers are not always bad and codebreakers are not always good. Codebreakers broke the German code, while their codemakers created it. Codemakers created the algorithms we use on the web, while typical hackers are codebreakers.
Cryptography
Before writing, secrecy essentially boiled down to looking over your shoulder to make sure no one was listening. Things got more complicated with long distance messaging and even more complex as technology has improved (discovering who is sending that message).
Codebreakers want access. They want to gain access to your email, credit info, social security numbers, credit card numbers, and the servers of these machines to read your messages.
Cryptography (literally meaning ‘hidden secret writing’) has been around for quite some time—In The Code Book, Simon Singh describes Mary, Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot, where she sought to overthrow her sister. She created a code, which she used to make her writing unreadable to anyone without the knowledge of how to translate it back. Unfortunately for her, she was found out and executed in 1587.
The most simple form of cipher, is the substitution cipher, wherein one letter or symbol is replaced by another.
Anyone with the ciphertext and this ‘key’ can decode the message. Everything depends on a key.
This worked pretty well for a while until frequency analysis, wherein a text can be analyzed to look for the number of times a certain letter occurs. In English, for instance, the letter E appears more frequently than any other. So taking the ciphertext and replacing E with the most frequently used letter, and so on, will yield a very similar message to the original.
A key can be physical or it can be information such as a password. It can be a fingerprint or use facial recognition.
A key is something unique that I have access to (knowledge — like a password, or a map), to gain access to something else. My password is a key to gain access to my email. My face now opens my iPhone X. My fingerprint is used to gain access to my modern computer.
Code
A more modern example, the Zodiac Killer, sent codes to the San Francisco Chronicle during the late 60’s and early 70’s. This code has yet to be cracked and the identity of the killer is still unknown.
There are secret treasure maps that depend on knowledge written in secret scrolls. People have spent their entire lives trying to crack the Beale Ciphers — secret messages that apparently contain directions to a buried treasure.
Another famous example is the Zimmerman telegram, an encrypted message sent by Germany to Mexico in early 1917 to propose an alliance betwen Mexico and Germany wherein Mexico would recieve Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The British intercepted and decrypted it unleashing a rage amongst the American public that led to the United States entering World War I.
Language
Language is a secret, unless you know it. If I’m in a cafe in Barcelona, everyone around me is telling secrets even if I can hear the words they’re saying. In WWII, the United States employed Native Americans (The Windtalkers) to send messages between different troops. Their language was so difficult and esoteric and unknown it could not be broken. It was also made into a Nicolas Cage movie. So there’s that.
Archaeologists have found many tablets of ancient writing and not been able to decipher what they mean. One of the most famous examples are ancient hieroglyphics written on cave walls in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 and is the greatest key we’ve ever found. It contains the same message written in 3 different languages which gave us the decoding instructions for hieroglyphics and thus, an unprecedented glimpse into the past.
We were suddenly able to understand many ancient texts and decipher their meanings and the values and traditions of ancient societies. It is one of the greatest keys discovered of all time.
Machines
As machines grew in complexity they were increasingly utilized in both codemaking and codebreaking. The most famous of these codemaking machines was the Enigma Machine, a German device used to encrypt messages before and during World War II. The machine was highly complex, with several different gears, keys and switches, all which had to be set in the right place to decrypt that day’s code.
Each month during the war, Enigma operators received a new codebook which specified which key should be used for each day.
The British set up a codebreaking team at Bletchley Park in England where hundreds of the brightest minds in the country set to the task of breaking this machine. Codebreakers were even recruited through public newspapers — if you could solve one, they would bring you in for an interview.
Much of this is depicted in the movie, The Imitation Game (see below).
The final realization to break the machine was the rigid structure of most of the messages. Early morning messages were all about weather, so bound to contain the word weather and ‘Hail Hitler’ was in every message. This vastly reduced the amount of complexity and combinations of the ciphertexts and allowed the Allies to break the machine.
Technology
We are dealing with streaming bits of numbers flying across the world and don’t have time for handwritten coded notes, boxes, locks, codebooks and strange machines. So for encryption to work with computers, we had to figure out a way to make this happen mathematically.
In math, an excellent candidate for this is any gigantic prime number (N) that is the product of two prime numbers, p & q. The brilliance of this is that, we can easily find a suitable (N) using p & q, but it is almost impossible to go back and find p & q, if you only know (N). This single fact is the modern day basis for all modern day encryption. Singh quotes the deputy director of the NSA to explain why this is so secure:
“If all the personal computers in the world-approximately 260 million computers-were to be put to work on a single PGP encrypted message, it would take on average an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe to break a single message.” — William Crowell, Deputy Director of the NSA
Large prime numbers are very powerful.
But if someone finds this out a method for rapid factoring of very large numbers, we better hope they aren’t evil.
This has been documented in many fictional accounts, including the movie Mercury Rising, where a young, autistic child breaks the algorithm and also Sneakers, where a fictional mathematician figures it out, creating a nightmare situation with the NSA (and a kick ass movie):
Implications
However, the public’s growing demand for cryptography conflicts with the needs of law enforcement and national security. For decades, the police and the intelligence services have used wire-taps to gather evidence against terrorists and organized crime syndicates. — Simon Singh, ‘The Code Book’
We are living in a world now where we are revealing more about ourselves. And governments want to protect their citizens. Naturally, they want to be aware if a terrorist attack is going to happen on their soil and really the only way to know this is through surveillance.
This central idea of surveillance vs. privacy is a massive societal issue. If people truly trusted the government to use this data only for good, there might not be issues, but a lot of people don’t. The United States signed into law The Patriot Act, shortly after 9/11.
Many technology companies are forced to give up user data to the government and most are very transparent about when they’re asked to do this and how often they are.
Edward Snowden came to a point where he stopped trusting the government and leaked sensitive data from the NSA in 2013. Wikileaks was created in 2006 by Julian Assange to be an organization for transparency across the world and has published 10 million government records since its launch. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning gave Wikileaks almost a million classified US government documents.
In addition to government surveillance privacy issues, there have been many famous hacks into corporations— most famously Ashley Madison, Target, and Equifax among many others.
Companies like Napster, Kazaa and Pirate Bay have threatened the value of many industries and have been in legal trouble ever since, while technologies like the Deep Web allow sites like Silk Road to people to operate under near complete privacy.
As our privacy becomes more and more of an issue as we give more of ourselves online, cryptography and the very nature of privacy continues to evolve.
Anonymous
Many great ironies have arisen from the history of secrets. Even after the British cracked the Enigma, they had to keep their discovery secret or the Germans would know they’d cracked it and change their whole system. Many of the codebreakers that aided the war effort were never properly given credit for their work, because they wanted their capabilities to remain hidden. Alan Turing, perhaps the greatest British codebreaker, had to keep it a secret that he was gay or he likely wouldn’t have been able to continue his work:
Jack Good, a veteran of Bletchley, commented: ‘Fortunately the authorities did not know that Turing was a homosexual. Otherwise we might have lost the war’ — Simon Singh
In a similar way, Edward Snowden’s whereabouts were a mystery as he went into hiding for some time. The founder of bitcoin remains anonymous. Phil Zimmerman was charged with treason for his creation of Pretty Good Privacy. Kim Dot Com, Julian Assange, the Dread Pirate Roberts are all in jail or exile for their exploits and perhaps the most well known breaker of codes, the group Anonymous, remain….well, Anonymous. Secrets, indeed.
