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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The Private against the Public? "The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write." David Kahn, The Codebreakers In the age of the vitreous man, whose data are not only collected by different institutions but kept under disclosure, out of reach, uncontrollable and unmanageable for the individual, privacy obtains new importance, receives a much higher value again. The irony behind is that those who long for cryptography in order to preserve more privacy actually have to trust the same people who first created the methods to "produce" something like that vitreous man; of course not the same individual but persons of the same area of science. It is the reign of experts. So far about self-determination. for a rather aesthetic view on privacy and cryptography see: http://www.t0.or.at/franck/d_franck.htm

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Governmental Influence Agencies like the NSA are currently able to eavesdrop on anyone with few restrictions only - though other messages are spread by the NSA. Theoretically cryptography can make that difficult. Hence those agencies speak up for actions like introducing trapdoors to make it possible to get access to everybody's data. See the U.S. discussion about the Clipper Chip some years ago: http://www.epic.org/crypto/clipper/ http://www.cdt.org/crypto/admin/041693whpress.txt While encryption offers us privacy for the transmission of data, we do not only wish to have it but also need it if we want to transport data which shall not be seen by anyone else but the recipient of our message. Given this, the governments and governmental institutions/organizations fear to lose control. Strict laws are the consequence. The often repeated rumor that the Internet was a sphere of illegality has been proven wrong. Some parts are controlled by law very clearly. One of them is cryptography. Prohibition of cryptography or at least its restriction are considered an appropriate tool against criminality. Or one should say: had been considered that. In the meantime also governmental institutions have to admit that those restrictions most of all work against the population instead against illegal actors. Therefore laws have been changed in many states during the last five years. Even the USA, the Master of cryptography-restriction, liberated its laws in December 1999 to be more open-minded now. for an insight into the discussion having gone on for years see: http://www.cdt.org/crypto/new2crypto/3.shtml the final text of the new U.S. Encryption Regulations you will find under: http://www.cdt.org/crypto/admin/000110cryptoregs.shtml http://www.cdt.org/crypto/admin/000114cryptoregs.txt an explanation of the regulations can be found under: http://www.cdt.org/crypto/admin/000112commercefactsheet.shtml

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Louis Braille b. Jan. 4, 1809, Coupvray, near Paris, France d. Jan. 6, 1852, Paris, France Educator who developed a system of printing and writing that is extensively used by the blind and that was named for him. Himself blind Braille became interested in a system of writing, exhibited at the school by Charles Barbier, in which a message coded in dots was embossed on cardboard. When he was 15, he worked out an adaptation, written with a simple instrument, that met the needs of the sightless. He later took this system, which consists of a six-dot code in various combinations, and adapted it to musical notation. He published treatises on his type system in 1829 and 1837.

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