after the code book

fucking great book. so glad for the holiday to consume it fully and in it's entirety in a short period of time, and oddly appropriate for MLK day considering the nature of surveillance the FBI maintained over Dr. King. i didn't get this book expecting to open a political shit storm. i thought it would be a retelling of historical intrigues and for a good portion of it, it's just that, a series of chapters using actual historical stories to illustrate the emergence and breaking of 4000 years of message encryptions and supposedly unbreakable codes.

that however is merely the groundwork for the revelation that it is all material to me personally and to everyone who believes in privacy, or in truth. there is a political issue at the root of cryptography. who has a right to encrypt in a digital information age? 200 years ago to privately share information, all two people needed was legs to move them away from ears and a common language. the government seemed to operate just fine without access to those conversations.

communication now is more complex, and we use computers to communicate, but the government doesn't want citizens to have the right to use strong encryption without giving them an access key, because criminals would have an advantage over their investigative techniques, which in return they promise not to use without a court order. yea right. as the author points out, fingerprints are the most relied upon technique by law enforcement, criminals can simply wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, and as of yet there has been no call from cops to stop the general public from wearing gloves just in case.

this book is over five years old so i'll be doing some follow up reading for sure, but it's a very interesting thing to know the power to be secure from government prying is available and downloadable for free. unless of course they already have the quantum computers needed to decode the PGP and they just aren't telling anyone.