[ExI] secrecy is power, was: RE: clarification

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: Re: [ExI] clarification

On 27 May 2017 at 16:27, spike wrote:
...
>
>>... All this gets so 1984-ish.  In our own times, it appears that private 
> communications are mostly behind us and that real political power 
> comes from finding ways to communicate secretly.  We can anticipate 
> the time when it becomes illegal to do so.
>

>...It already is sort of illegal. Border Control can demand passwords to
all your electronic devices, phones, laptops, etc. And demand that you
decrypt any encrypted files or partitions that they find... not having a
smartphone or laptop at all makes you REALLY suspicious.  :)

BillK
_______________________________________________



My 10 yr old son and his friend in his 5th grade class were writing software
to do Caesar cyphers.  I demonstrated how easily I can crack their codes if
it is simple substitution, with a few lines of VBA script.  So they tried to
outsmart the old man by making the space a character, so you have 27
subsitutions.  That kinda works for those who get good at cryptoquips: a
skilled player can eventually almost read a cryptoquip.  Making the space a
character makes it harder to do that.  But, you can still crack it easily
enough by finding the periods and commas, and seeing what character follows
it.  Also you can use the ETAOIN SHRDLU algorithm.  So again I cracked all
their codes, and could still do it once they started spelling out "comma"
and "period" and "dash" or if they used all punctuation and numbers in their
substitution algorithm.

Then I taught them how to do a simplified version of public key encryption.
I couldn't crack those.  

Then they were told by their teacher that it is against the rules to put
encrypted messages on their classroom email system...

{8-[

Oy.  This worries me in that it gets the students accustomed to the notion
that secret communication is illegal.

spike