Re: Root Causes Roots

[liberty@gate.net (Jim Ray)]

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Professor Froomkin writes:

>Jim didn't take my Con Law I course.

True, and from what I hear, I regret not taking it. 

>
>In message <199507161819.OAA06090@bb.hks.net> Jim Ray writes:
>[cuts throughout]
>> 
>> Amendment IX -- "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights
>> shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
>                                                      ^^^^^^^ 
>> [The right to write code was among many rights NOT enumerated.]
>> 
>
>Very hard to argue that the right to write code (as opposed to, 
>say, the right to write in code) 

A distinction my feeble mind fails to grasp, as doing the one is required
in order to even make the other possible. [Now all can see why I had 
so much trouble in law school.]

>existed in the late 18th century; 

A short trip to:"CME's cryptography timeline" [Recently suggested 
on this list] and found at URL:

http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/html/timeline.html  

Reveals some interesting code-history.

[In case the good professor or others on the list are without a
SLIP/PPP connection, a not-so-short excerpt from CME's cryptography
timeline follows]:

_____________________________________________________________


- - From David Kahn's ``The Codebreakers'': 

     ``It must be that as soon as a culture has reached a certain level,
probably measured largely by its literacy, cryptography appears
spontaneously -- as its parents, language and writing, probably also 
did. 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. Cultural 
diffusion seems a less likely explanation for its occurrence in so many
areas, many of them distant and isolated.'' [p. 84] 

The invention of cryptography is not limited to either civilians or the 
government. Wherever the need for secrecy is felt, the invention occurs. 
However, over time the quality of the best available system continues to 
improve and those best systems were often invented by civilians.
Again, from David Kahn: 

     ``It was the amateurs of cryptology who created the species. The 
professionals, who almost certainly surpassed them in cryptanalytic 
expertise, concentrated on down-to-earth problems of the systems that 
were then in use but are now outdated.
     The amateurs, unfettered to those realities, soared into the 
empyrean of theory.'' [pp. 125-6] 

In the list to follow (until I learn how to make tables in HTML), each
description starts with (date; civ or govt; source). Sources are 
identified in full at the end. 

      about 1900 BC; civ; Kahn p.71; an Egyptian scribe used non-standard 
hieroglyphs in an inscription. Kahn lists this as the first documented 
example of written cryptography. 

      1500 BC; civ; Kahn p.75; a Mesopotamian tablet contains an enciphered 
formula for the making of glazes for pottery. 

      500-600 BC; civ; Kahn p.77; Hebrew scribes writing down the book of 
Jeremiah used a reversed-alphabet simple substitution cipher known as 
ATBASH. (Jeremiah started dictating to Baruch in 605 BC but the chapters 
containing these bits of cipher are attributed to a source labeled ``C'' 
(believed not to be Baruch) which could be an editor writing after the 
Babylonian exile in 587 BC, someone contemporaneous with Baruch or even 
Jeremiah himself.)
     ATBASH was one of a few Hebrew ciphers of the time. 

      487 BC; govt; Kahn p.82; the Greeks used a device called the 
``skytale'' -- a staff around which a long, thin strip of leather was 
wrapped and written on. The leather was taken off and worn as a belt. 
Presumably, the recipient would have a matching staff and the encrypting 
staff would be left home. 

      50-60 BC; govt; Kahn p.83; Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) used a simple 
substitution with the normal alphabet (just shifting the letters a fixed 
amount) in government communciations. This cipher was less strong than 
ATBASH, by a small amount, but in a day when few people read in the first 
place, it was good enough.

<SNIP! Off to some [slightly] more modern times.>

1564; civ; Kahn p.144(footnote); Bellaso published an autokey cipher 
improving on the work of Cardano who appears to have invented the idea. 

      1623; civ; Bacon; Sir Francis Bacon described a cipher which now 
bears his name -- a biliteral cipher, known today as a 5-bit binary 
encoding. He advanced it as a steganographic device -- by using variation 
in type face to carry each bit of the encoding. 

      1585; civ; Kahn p.146; Blaise de Vigen�re wrote a book on ciphers, 
including the first authentic plaintext and ciphertext autokey systems 
(in which previous plaintext or ciphertext letters are used for the 
current letter's key). [Kahn p.147: both of these were forgotten and
re-invented late in the 19th century.] [The autokey idea survives today
in the DES CBC and CFB modes.] 

      1790's; civ/govt; Kahn p.192, Cryptologia v.5 No.4 pp.193-208; Thomas 
Jefferson, possibly aided by Dr. Robert Patterson (a mathematician at U. 
Penn.), invented his wheel cipher. This was re-invented in several forms 
later and used in WW-II by the US Navy as the Strip Cipher, M-138-A. 

      1817; govt; Kahn p.195; Colonel Decius Wadsworth produced a geared 
cipher disk with a different number of letters in the plain and cipher 
alphabets -- resulting in a progressive cipher in which alphabets are used 
irregularly, depending on the plaintext used. 

      1854; civ; Kahn p.198; Charles Wheatstone invented what has become 
known as the Playfair cipher, having been publicized by his friend Lyon 
Playfair. This cipher uses a keyed array of letters to make a digraphic 
cipher which is easy to use in the field. He also re-invented the 
Wadsworth device and is known for that one. 

      1857; civ; Kahn p.202; Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort's cipher (a 
variant of what's called ``Vigen�re'') was published by his brother, 
after the admiral's death in the form of a 4x5 inch card. 

      1859; civ; Kahn p.203; Pliny Earle Chase published the first 
description of a fractionating (tomographic) cipher. 

      1854; civ; Cryptologia v.5 No.4 pp.193-208; Charles Babbage seems to 
have re-invented the wheel cipher. 

      1861-1980; civ; Deavours; 
          ``A study of United States patents from the issuance of the 
first cryptographic patent in 1861 through 1980 identified 1,769 
patents which are primarily related to cryptography.'' [p.1] 

      1861; civ/(govt); Kahn p.207; Friedrich W. Kasiski published a book 
giving the first general solution of a polyalphabetic cipher with 
repeating passphrase, thus marking the end of several hundred years of 
strength for the polyalphabetic cipher. 

      1861-5; govt; Kahn p.215; during the Civil War, possibly among other 
ciphers, the Union used substitution of select words followed by word 
columnar-transposition while the Confederacy used Vigen�re (the solution 
of which had just been published by Kasiski). 

      1891; govt/(civ); Cryptologia v.5 No.4 pp.193-208; Major Etienne 
Bazeries did his version of the wheel cipher and published the design 
in 1901 after the French Army rejected it. [Even though he was a military 
cryptologist, the fact that he published it leads me to rate this as (civ)
as well as govt.] 
<SNIP>
______________________________________________________________
End of copy from "CME's cryptography timeline." Thanks [and apologies]
to David Kahn, whose 1960s book is well worth buying, even today.
______________________________________________________________

Professor Froomkin continues:

>hence it is hard to argue that it could be "retained" 
>today.  

In view of the foregoing timeline excerpts, I would 
respectfully disagree.

>
>Assuming that the ninth amendment has, or could have, teeth,

[I am certain it _would_, with ballot-access-fairness reform,
but that's a side issue, like abortion, that should *not*
occupy this list. I am, however, quite willing to discuss it
by private e-mail. JMR]

>it 
>is unlikely to go beyond rights existing or closely analogous to 
>those held by "the people" [free white males, more likely] at 
>the time of the amendment's ratification.  Just as well if you 
>think about it carefully.


Careful thought reveals a atrong suspicion that the "3/5ths people" 
[slaves] had more use for crypto at the time than free white males 
did, but I doubt much, if any, evidence of that activity was 
preserved, and I'm sure it was _forcefully_ discouraged if ever
discovered...My point is, slaves, or those who live in fear of 
eventual slavery, for whatever reason, have a strong affinity for 
cryptography. Note, for example, early use [mentioned in the timeline
above] by the Jewish people.
JMR

Regards, Jim Ray
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." Voltaire


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