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Security Measures? The more so-called security measures are taken the more control and the less freedom is granted. Whereas criminals are flexible in their computer work/digital existence, the average person cannot be. So it is her/him who gets punished with an increase of control. Of course security can be in favor of the population as well - and this is the case if cryptography is legal so that everyone has access to it to protect his/her data. This one needs for e-commerce, secure payments and transmission of private data, mostly e-mails or access to websites where one needs a password. E-mails are nothing else than postcards, letters without envelopes. Without encryption they are easy to open, read and trace back, even without knowing the password. Rumors that Echelon works with a list of key-words, controlling any e-mail in the world and reacting to words of that list, led to actions like the Jam Eschelon Day, last time held on October 21st, 1999, to confuse the espionage system. for more information on Jam Eschelon Day see: But the respect for privacy stands for an essential values in democratic societies. So, how can it be regarded a governmental risk? At a conference: "How many people here fear a greater risk from government abuses of power than from criminal activity?" The majority raised their hands, one participant shouted "What's the difference?" (anonymous) If governments really care for the people and want to fight against cybercriminality they should rather support the work on the latest technologies for encryption than to restrict their access. Or even better: they should not intervene at all - to make sure they do not build in any trapdoors. Though it is already too late for discussion like this one as the trapdoors are already part of most of the key-systems. Rumors about PGP and trapdoors do not help the confidence in cryptology. for information about the risks of cryptography see: |
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Asymmetric or Public-Key-Cryptosystems Here the keys for encryption and decryption differ. There needs to exist a private key, which is only known to the individual, and a public key, which is published. Every person has her or his own private key that is never published. It is used for decrypting only. Mathematically the different keys are linked to each other, still it is nearly impossible to derive the private key from the public one. For sending a message to someone, one has to look up the other's public key and encrypt the message with it. The keyholder will use his/her private key to decrypt it. While everybody can send a message with the public key, the private key absolutely has to stay secret - and probably will. "The best system is to use a simple, well understood algorithm which relies on the security of a key rather than the algorithm itself. This means if anybody steals a key, you could just roll another and they have to start all over." (Andrew Carol) very famous examples for public-key systems are: · RSA: The RSA is probably one of the most popular public-key cryptosystems. With the help of RSA, messages can be encrypted, but also digital signatures are provided. The mathematics behind are supposedly quite easy to understand (see: · PGP: PGP is a public key encryption program. Most of all it is used for e-mail encryption. It is supposed to be quite safe - until now. · PGPi is simply the international variation of PGP. for further information about the RSA and other key-systems visit the RSA homepage: or: All of those tools, like hash functions, too, can help to enhance security and prevent crime. They can theoretically, but sometimes they do not, as the example of the published credit card key of France in March 2000 showed. For more information see: Still, cryptography can help privacy. On the other hand cryptography is only one element to assure safe transport of data. It is especially the persons using it who have to pay attention. A key that is told to others or a lost cryptographic key are the end of secrecy. |
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The 19th Century: Machine-Assisted Manufacturing Eli Whitney's proposal for a simplification and standardization of component parts marked a further milestone in the advance of the By the middle of the 19th century the general concepts of |
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Public Relations and Propaganda Public relations usually is associated with the influencing of public opinion. Therefore it has subsequently been linked with propaganda. Using one of the many definitions of propaganda "... the manipulation of symbols as a means of influencing attitudes on controversial matters" (Harold D. Lasswell), the terms propaganda and PR seem to be easily interchangeable. Still many authors explicitly distinguish between public relations, advertising and propaganda. Unlike PR, which is often described as objective and extensive information of the public, advertising and propaganda are associated with manipulative activities. Nevertheless to treat public relations and propaganda as equivalents stands in the tradition of PR. Also institutions like the |
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1913: Henry Ford and the Assembly Line Realizing that he'd need to lower costs The use of interchangeable parts meant making the individual pieces of the car the same every time. Therefore the machines had to be improved, but once they were adjusted, they could be operated by a low-skilled laborer. To reduce the time workers spent moving around Ford refined the flow of work in the manner that as one task was finished another began, with minimum time spent in set-up. Furthermore he divided the labor by breaking the assembly of the legendary Model T in 84 distinct steps. Putting all those findings together in 1913 Ford installed the first moving |
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Hill & Knowlton Although it is generally hard to distinguish between public relations and propaganda, It furthermore played a central role in the Gulf War. On behalf of the Kuwaiti government it presented a 15-year-old girl to testify before Congress about human rights violations in a Kuwaiti hospital. The girl, later found out to be the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S., and its testimony then became the centerpiece of a finely tuned PR campaign orchestrated by Hill & Knowlton and co-ordinated with the White House on behalf of the government of Kuwait an the Citizens for a Free Kuwait group. Inflaming public opinion against Iraq and bringing the U.S. Congress in favor of war in the Gulf, this probably was one of the largest and most effective public relations campaigns in history. Running campaigns against abortion for the Catholic Church and representing the Accused of pursuing potentially illegal proxy spying operation for intelligence agencies, Richard Cheney, head of Hill & Knowltons New York office, denied this allegations, but said that "... in such a large organization you never know if there's not some sneak operation going on." On the other hand former (Source: Carlisle, Johan: Public Relationships: Hill & Knowlton, Robert Gray, and the CIA. |
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More and more, faster and faster, but... Since the invention of appropriate means and technologies, communication no longer requires face-to-face meetings. From writing and reading to using computers, expanding and exhausting one's possibilities to communicate relies more and more on the application of skills we have to learn. With the increasing importance of communication technologies, learning to apply them properly becomes a kind of rite of passage. A Small World From the very beginning - the first Sumerian pictographs on clay tablets - to today's state of the art technologies - broadband communication via Since the invention of the electrical telegraph, but especially with today's growing digital communication networks, every location on earth seems to be close, however distant it may be, and also time no longer remains a significant dimension. Threatened Cultural Memory More and more information is transmitted and produced faster and faster, but the shelf life of information becomes more and more fragile. For more than 4500 years Sumerian pictographs written on clay tablets remained intact, but newspapers and books, printed some decades ago, crumble into pieces; film reels, video tapes and cassettes corrode. Digitalization of information is not a cure; on the contrary it even intensifies the danger of destroying cultural heritage. Data increasingly requires specific software and hardware, but to regularly convert all available digitized information is an unexecutable task. Compared to the longevity of pictographs on clay tablets, digitized information is produced for instant one-time use. The increasing production and processing of information causes a problem hitherto unknown: the loss of our cultural memory. For further information see For another history of communication systems see |
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Who owns the Internet and who is in charge? The Internet/Matrix still depends heavily on public infrastructure and there is no dedicated owner of the whole Internet/Matrix, but the networks it consists of are run and owned by corporations and institutions. Access to the Internet is usually provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for a monthly fee. Each network is owned by someone and has a network operation center from where it is centrally controlled, but the Internet/Matrix is not owned by any single authority and has no network operation center of its own. No legal authority determines how and where networks can be connected together, this is something the managers of networks have to agree about. So there is no way to ever gain ultimate control of the Matrix/Internet. The in some respects decentralized Matrix/Internet architecture and administration do not imply that there are no authorities for oversight and common standards for sustaining basic operations, for administration: There are authorities for IP number and domain name registrations, e.g. Ever since the organizational structures for Internet administration have changed according to the needs to be addressed. Up to now, administration of the Internet is a collaborative undertaking of several loose cooperative bodies with no strict hierarchy of authority. These bodies make decisions on common guidelines, as Amazingly, there seems to be an unspoken and uncodified consent of what is allowed and what is forbidden on the Internet that is widely accepted. Codifications, as the so-called Sometimes violations not already subject to law become part of governmental regulations, as it was the case with spamming, the unsolicited sending of advertising mail messages. But engineers proved to be quicker and developed software against spamming. So, in some respects, the Internet is self-regulating, indeed. For a detailed report on Internet governance, click here. |
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Convergence, 2000- Digital technologies are used to combine previously separated communication and media systems as telephony, audiovisual technologies and computing to new services and technologies, thus forming extensions of existing communication systems and resulting in fundamentally new communication systems. This is what is meant by today's new buzzwords "multimedia" and "convergence". Classical dichotomies as the one of computing and telephony and traditional categorisations no longer apply, because these new services no longer fit traditional categories. |
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Virtual Marylin Monroe This is the story of the virtual Marylyn Monroe created by MRALab in Switzerland. The biography features her personal and professional stories. This being the biography of a virtual being, it does not end with the present and includes, instead, a chapter on her destiny. |
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CIM To perform manufacturing firm's functions related to design and production the CAD/CAM technology, for computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing, was developed. Today it is widely recognized that the scope of computer applications must extend beyond design and production to include the business functions of the firm. The name given to this more comprehensive use of computers is computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM). |
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Joseph Stalin Joseph Stalin (1879-1953): After Lenin's death he took over and became a dictator without any limits of power. Everyone who dared to talk or act against him or was in suspicion of doing so, got killed. Millions were murdered. His empire was one made out of propaganda and fear. As long as he was in power his picture had to be in every flat and bureau. Soon after his death the cult was stopped and in 1956 the De-Stalination was started, though he was partly rehabilitated in 1970. |
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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 |
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NSFNet Developed under the auspices of |
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Operating system An operating system is software that controls the many different operations of a computer and directs and coordinates its processing of programs. It is a remarkably complex set of instructions that schedules the series of jobs (user applications) to be performed by the computer and allocates them to the computer's various hardware systems, such as the |
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1896 1896 The Daily Mail was published in Great Britain. It was the first newspaper for the masses. With the emerging of newspapers the manner how politics was perceived by the public changed completely. It became more difficult to keep secrets, while at the same time there was suddenly a new and nearly perfect tool for manipulation. |
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Satellites Communications satellites are relay stations for radio signals and provide reliable and distance-independent high-speed connections even at remote locations without high-bandwidth infrastructure. On point-to-point transmission, the transmission method originally employed on, satellites face increasing competition from In the future, satellites will become stronger, cheaper and their orbits will be lower; their services might become as common as satellite TV is today. For more information about satellites, see How Satellites Work ( |
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The Rocky Horror Picture Show The story of Frank-N-furter, Brad and Janet ... Don't dream it, be it! http://www.rockyhorrorpictureshow.com/ |
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cryptoanalysis the study of breaking others' codes to transform a message back into a legible form without knowing the key from the beginning |
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Terrestrial antennas Microwave transmission systems based on terrestrial antennas are similar to satellite transmission system. Providing reliable high-speed access, they are used for cellular phone networks. The implementation of the |
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codes an algorithm for bringing a legible message into an illegible form. There has to exist some sort of code book to encode/decode it. |
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plaintext the original, legible text |
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Newsgroups Newsgroups are on-line discussion groups on the Usenet. Over 20,000 newsgroups exist, organized by subject into hierarchies. Each subject hierarchy is further broken down into subcategories. Covering an incredible wide area of interests and used intensively every day, they are an important part of the Internet. For more information, click here ( |
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Napoleon Napoleon I. (1769-1821) was French King from 1804-1815. He is regarded as the master of propaganda and disinformation of his time. Not only did he play his game with his own people but also with all European nations. And it worked as long as he managed to keep up his propaganda and the image of the winner. Part of his already nearly commercial ads was that his name's "N" was painted everywhere. Napoleon understood the fact that people believe what they want to believe - and he gave them images and stories to believe. He was extraordinary good in black propaganda. Censorship was an element of his politics, accompanied by a tremendous amount of positive images about himself. But his enemies - like the British - used him as a negative image, the reincarnation of the evil (a strategy still very popular in the Gulf-War and the Kosovo-War) (see |
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ciphertext the enciphered/encoded and primarily illegible text |
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Nero Nero's full name was Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37-68 AD). Nero was Roman Emperor from 54-68 AD; during the first years in power he stood under the influence of his teacher |
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Clipper Chip The Clipper Chip is a cryptographic device proposed by the U.S. government that purportedly intended to protect private communications while at the same time permitting government agents to obtain the "keys" upon presentation of what has been vaguely characterized as "legal authorization." The "keys" are held by two government "escrow agents" and would enable the government to access the encrypted private communication. While Clipper would be used to encrypt voice transmissions, a similar chip known as Capstone would be used to encrypt data. The underlying cryptographic algorithm, known as Skipjack, was developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). |
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Wide Application Protocol (WAP) The WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including While Internet access has been possible in the past, different manufacturers have used different technologies. In the future, devices and service systems that use WAP will be able to interoperate. Source: Whatis.com |
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Black Propaganda Black propaganda does not tell its source. The recipient cannot find out the correct source. Rather would it be possible to get a wrong idea about the sender. It is very helpful for separating two allies. |
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Bulletin Board Systems A BBS (bulletin board system) is a computer that can be reached by computer modem dialing (you need to know the phone number) or, in some cases, by Bulletin board systems originated and generally operate independently of the Internet. Source: Whatis.com |
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Enigma Machine The Enigma Encryption Machine was famous for its insecurities as for the security that it gave to German ciphers. It was broken, first by the Poles in the 1930s, then by the British in World War II. |
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Artificial intelligence approaches Looking for ways to create intelligent machines, the field of |
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News Corporation The News Corporation Ltd., a global media holding company, which governed News Limited (Australia), News International (U.K.), and News America Holdings Inc. (U.S.) was founded by the Australian-born newspaper publisher and media entrepreneur, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch's corporate interests center on newspaper, magazine, book, and electronic publishing; television broadcasting; and film and video production, principally in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. |
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Comsat The Communications Satellite Cooperation provides international communications solutions via the global, 17-satellite INTELSAT system and 4-satellite INMARSAT satellite systems. Calls are beamed up to the satellite and back down to Earth, where special gateway land earth stations re-route them through the appropriate local or international telephone network. COMSAT operates Earth Stations in each part of the world to route calls efficiently within each ocean region. Earth Stations are located in Santa Paula, California; Southbury, Connecticut; Ankara, Turkey; and Kuantan, Malaysia. http://www.comsat.com/default.htm |
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to encipher/encode to put a word or text into ciphers/codes |
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Nadia Thalman Nadia Thalman is director of |
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Hill & Knowlton John W. Hill opened the doors of his first public relations office in 1927 in Cleveland, Ohio. His early clients were banks, steel manufacturers, and other industrial companies in the Midwest. Hill managed the firm until 1962, and remained active in it until shortly before his death in New York City in 1977. In 1952, Hill and Knowlton became the first American public relations consultancy to recognize the business communication implications engendered by formation of the European Economic Community. Hill and Knowlton established a network of affiliates across Europe and by the middle of the decade had become the first American public relations firm to have wholly-owned offices in Europe. Hill and Knowlton, a member of the WPP Group integrated communications services family, has extensive resources and geographic coverage with its 59 offices in 34 countries. Hill and Knowlton is known for its hard-hitting tactics and said to have connections with intelligence services. |
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Gopher Gopher is a menu system with hierarchically structured list of files that predates the World Wide Web. Today Gopher is of diminishing importance and mostly replaced by the |
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