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A Tool for Privacy |
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The algorithm being the code leads to encryption. When Alan Turing worked on his Turing Machine, he planned a machine where the instruction-code was part of its working, where the binary code was a fixed logic in dispute, in other words the machine turning into its own algorithm, which means nothing else than dialectic.
And exactly here the theoretical work on cryptography touches - as a consequence of the actor always having been part of the technical arrangements - an issue of modern democracy, the question about the private and the public: the terms are changing, do not fit to their original meanings anymore. One might say the Internet is something private. One might state the contrary. Both sentences are wrong. It is neither of them. Maybe we do not all feel it yet, but humans are going through a stage of blurred words, where classic definitions get lost, just like the codes/algorithms of behavior. The meta-narratives break down, not leaving anything but puzzle pieces. We can never be private on the Internet. Nor could we be in public if we were "out there" in virtual reality.
Cryptography, the study pretending to work for privacy, cannot provide us with absolute privacy either, as the danger of losing it through a decryption attack hinders its prospering. At the latest with the quantum computers coming into existence the patterns of the encoded picture will not be visible anymore. At the same time the social relations, its exact and excluding meanings must blur.
Democracy needs something to rely on, something to refer to, just like the private and the public.
Still, our need for privacy on the one hand and curiosity on the other hand create the longing for cryptography of information as well as its decoding.
"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."
(Cypherpunk's Manifesto)
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Technological measures
As laid down in the proposed EU Directive on copyright and related  rights in the information society technological measures mean "... any technology, device, or component that, in the normal course of its operations, is designed to prevent or inhibit the infringement of any copyright..." The U.S. DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) divides technological measures in two categories: 1) measures that prevent unauthorized access to a copyrighted work, and 2) measures that prevent unauthorized copying of a copyrighted work. Also the making or selling of devices or services that can be used to circumvent either category of technological measures is prohibited under certain circumstances in the DMCA. Furthermore the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty states that the "... contracting parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors..."
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