Over the last year, law enforcement officials around the world have been pressing
hard on the notion that without a magical “backdoor” to access the content of any and all encrypted communications by ordinary people, they’ll be totally incapable of fulfilling their duties
to investigate crime and protect the public. EFF and many others have pushed
back — including launching a petition with our friends to SaveCrypto,
which this week reached 100,000 signatures, forcing a response from President
Obama.
This is in addition to multiple findings that the government’s “going dark”
concern has proven completely unfounded
in the past, along with former national security officers disavowing
the concern all together. And given law enforcement’s continuing attacks on
the public’s use of encryption, we think it’s time for a quick look at the long
tradition of encryption use by some ordinary, and some not so ordinary, Americans.
Of course most folks know that cryptography is a critical military tool. In
one of NSA’s
own published histories
[pdf] of cryptology, the government touts its significance, and many folks believe,
reasonably, that cryptography played a significant role in the Allies winning
WWII. But law enforcement officials have recently made clear that they believe
the government — and only the government — should
benefit from the routine use of the most secure encryption technologies. And
they are currently endeavoring
to restrict the widespread use of secure encryption technologies by the public.
But cryptography has always been far more than just a military or government
tool. Government officials were never the only ones spending time and resources
using and developing new encryption techniques. Indeed, far from being something
that has been employed only by reigning officials, encryption has been used
by civilians, businesspeople, and revolutionaries — including the Founding
Fathers of the United States — for centuries.
One of the earliest (and still unsolved) known encrypted works is the Voynich
manuscript, an illustrated codex that has been carbon-dated to the early
15th century. And the first known English-language book on cryptology was published
in 1641, entitled Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger by John
Wilkins. By the 1800s, knowledge of various ways to conceal the contents
of a message was widespread — and many ordinary individuals used cryptology for
everything from business communications to love
letters.