Cryptography and Democracy Cryptography and democracy are clearly related to each other when we talk about teledemocracy. Many answers of civilians to certain state institutions can already be posed on the Internet. Many bureaucratic duties can be fulfilled through the Internet as well. But on February 8th 2000 the worldwide first elections on the Internet were performed. The elections themselves were nothing important, students' elections at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. But the project, called i-vote, with a preparation time of 10 months, wrote history. For a correct result, there existed several different encryption processes at the same time, like the digital signature, a blinding for anonymizing the vote and a virtual election paper that had to be encrypted as well, as simple e-mails could have been traced back. The question whether teledemocracy can provide us with a more intensive democracy has to be answered within a different field of questions; here the question is rather about the role of cryptography in this area. The use of cryptography in teledemocracy is inevitable, but does it also re-influence cryptography? Or will it influence the different governments' laws again? The sentence "We are committed to protecting the privacy of your personal information" that can be read as the introduction-sentence at the Free-PC-homepage (http://www.free-pc.com/privacy.tp) poses already the question on how that company can know about personal information. Soon they lift the curtain, telling us that we leave cookies visiting their website - as we do everywhere else. With that information, provided through the cookie, they try to select the appropriate advertisement-sortiment for the individual. Their line of reasoning is that individualized advertisements offer the clients the best and most interesting products without being overruled by not-interesting commercials. But still we find ourselves overruled by the issue that someone believes to know what is good for us. And our privacy is floating away ... Human Rights call for the right for privacy. We can go on fighting for privacy but anonymity has disappeared long ago. If we leave cookies and other data by visiting websites, we might be anything but surely not anonymous. for more information about privacy and Human Rights see: http://www.privacyinternational.org/survey/ http://www.gilc.org/privacy/survey/ for re-anonymizing see: http://www.rewebber.de "The fight for privacy today will always include the fight for unrestricted access to cryptography tools, for at least getting a slight chance that the buying of a book or any other small thing turns into a chain of messages for someone else's purpose, whether it might be governmental or commercial." (Cypherpunk's Manifesto) for more information on the Cypherpunk's Manifesto see: http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html This year again many conferences on the topic of cryptography take place. For further information see: http://www.swcp.com/~iacr/events/index.html

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Timeline BC ~ 1900 BC: Egyptian writers use non-standard Hieroglyphs in inscriptions of a royal tomb; supposedly this is not the first but the first documented example of written cryptography 1500 an enciphered formula for the production of pottery is done in Mesopotamia parts of the Hebrew writing of Jeremiah's words are written down in "atbash", which is nothing else than a reverse alphabet and one of the first famous methods of enciphering 4th century Aeneas Tacticus invents a form of beacons, by introducing a sort of water-clock 487 the Spartans introduce the so called "skytale" for sending short secret messages to and from the battle field 170 Polybius develops a system to convert letters into numerical characters, an invention called the Polybius Chequerboard. 50-60 Julius Caesar develops an enciphering method, later called the Caesar Cipher, shifting each letter of the alphabet an amount which is fixed before. Like atbash this is a monoalphabetic substitution.

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Whitfield Diffie Whitfield Diffie is an Engineer at Sun Microsystems and co-author of Privacy on the Line (MIT Press) in 1998 with Susan Landau. In 1976 Diffie and Martin Hellman developed public key cryptography, a system to send information without leaving it open to be read by everyone.

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