"A man is crazy who writes a secrete
in any other way than one which
will conceal it from the vulgar."
Roger Bacon (~1250 AD)
The essence of human communication is not only the social behavior to give or get messages (of whatever meaning) but also how to give and get them, and to include certain people by excluding others from the process of informing.
e.g. whispering is an effective way of talking to exclude the majority.
What about ways of writing?
Already some of the first written messages in human history obviously found special forms of hiding contents from the so-called others. When the knowledge of writing meant a privilege in a stronger sense as it is true today (in China for a long period writing was forbidden to people not working for the government), the alphabet itself was a kind of cryptography (that is why Catholic churches were painted with pictures explaining the stories of the Bible).
Certainly the methods of deciphering and enciphering improved a lot during the last 4.000 years. In the meantime cryptography has become a topic without end and with less technological limits every day. On the one hand there is the field of biometrics, which is highly related to cryptography but still in its beginnings, on the other hand there emerge so-called infowars, which intend to substitute or at least accompany war and are unthinkable without cryptography.
But there is much more to detect, like the different forms of de- and encoding. And very important, too, there is the history of cryptography that tells us about the basics to make it easier to understand today's issues.
In the actual age of (dis-)information storing and transporting electronic information safely increases its importance. Governments, institutions, economy and individuals rely on the hope that no-one can read or falsify their messages/data as it is much more difficult to detect and proof abuses in electronic media than in elder forms of written communication.
TEXTBLOCK 1/2 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611776/100438658802
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)
TEXTBLOCK 2/2 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611776/100438659172
Automation is concerned with the application of machines to tasks once performed by humans or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Although the term mechanization is often used to refer to the simple replacement of human labor by machines,