Shell Game
How the Intelligence Community Avoids Congressional Oversight
Introduction
It is not necessary to be crazy to be a cryptanalysis, but it always helps.
Joseph Rochefort
Once up on a time during the beginning years
of the agricultural era in the fertile basin around the
For example, Senator
Russ Feingold (D WI), at the Hearing on Restoring the Rule of
Law, Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the
Constitution, in his opening remarks said:
Tomorrow,
September 17,(2008) is the 221st anniversary of the day in
1787 when 39 members of the Constitutional Convention signed the
Constitution in
Senator Feingold was astute enough to vote NO to authorize the Iraq War. He explained recently on television that, "The briefing given by our intelligence agency, CIA, was less than sincere." Yet as astute as he is, he doesn't even know that CIA is not our intelligence agency. Like most Senators, he does not even know that he is not allowed to talk to any of the operatives of our intelligence agency, NSA. He is not allowed to know NSA's organization chart. He is not allowed to know their annual budget. And would be shocked to know that the budget is thrice that of FBI and CIA put together.
". . . on October 24,1952 President Harry S Truman scratched his signature on the bottom of a seven-page presidential memorandum addressed to Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson and Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett. . . . , the order directed the establishment of an agency to be known as the National Security Agency. It was the birth certificate for America's newest and most secret agency, so secret in fact that only a handful in the government would be permitted to know of its existence" (The Puzzle Palace, ISBN 0-395-31286-8, James Bamford , page 1) Sometime in the spring of 1953, word came down that the Joint Chiefs under our new president, Dwight Eisenhower, has settled on the final arrangement that:
1.
NSA will be the intelligence agency of the
2. NSA will be headed by a three stared general (or admiral) who will answer to a Special Committee of the National Security Council consisting of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the President.
3.
Congress has oversight over CIA and will be told that CIA is the
4. CIA will actually engage in all activities that result in changing situations directly, e.g. our Afghanistan arming as in the movie "Charlie's War" ; our secret army in Laos during the Viet Nam war; mining the harbors of Nicaragua; assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973; Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion; waterboarding and other torture of Iraqis taken to foreign countries; buying and controlling foreign news media; et cetera (see "The Invisible Government" ).
5. The specific duties of NSA were not delineated but they would include all passive intelligence gathering. According to Frank Church (D-ID), Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, no statute establishes the NSA or defines the permissible scope of its activities. The CIA, on the other hand, was established by Congress under the National Security Act of 1947 setting out their legal mandate as well as the restrictions on its activities.
How do I know this? CIA was formed two
years before NSA to replace the Office of Strategic Service of WW
II fame. NSA was to include the signal intelligence duties
of the three services, Army Security Agency, located at Arlington
Hall Station of WW II code breaking fame; the Navel Security
Service, located in DC at
· It was blatantly realized that withdrawing Congress's right of oversight was unconstitutional. It was strongly held, though, that the end justified the means because the recent history of WW II had shown that years and millions of lives were saved by code breaking and the secrecy thereof. It is imperative that there not be even a hint that an advisory's messages are being decrypted. NSA employees were not allowed to tell outsiders that they worked for NSA or No Such Agency, as we used to say.
· There has to be some kind of cover system for the dissemination of NSA's end product, information that would be used by other parts of the Government; so CIA was a natural for the 'cut out'.
· NSA has a cadre of people versed in all main languages and dialects in the world. Not only that, they are versed in the customs, slang, dress, and politics of each country. They are comprised of military and civilians from age 20 to 70 of both gender and international heritage. Where else in the US Government would you have such a pool of talent for surreptitious entering and snooping in other countries? There is a saying in ELENT (electronic intelligence), "sometimes the cheapest way to break a strong cipher is by greasing" -the palm by infiltration. In general, NSA people are just not the kind of people who would want to be associated with programs of assassination, torture and such aggressive behavior. The aggressive and passive functions would just not mix under the same recruitment and administrative organization. And there would be no way to keep the 'left brain' from knowing what the 'right brain' does. So separation on the bases of aggressive and non-aggressive was a very natural and prudent thing to do.
· Both of these organizations and many others provide information to the National Security Council for digestion analysis and dissemination through out the Executive Branch.
But now there is no such activity of deciphering coded messages by the government or anyone else. Just as the invention of airplanes made the use of battleships obsolete, the invention of the RSA public key encryption algorithms in 1979, has eliminated the practicality of deciphering the origin or context of email messages today. NSA's reasons for not having congressional oversight have vanished. Simply put, William Crowell, Deputy Director of NSA said in 1997 at a cryptography conference, "If all the personal computers in the world - 260 million - were put to work on a single PGP-encrypted message, it would still take an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe, on average, to break a single message.” As the Evangelist know, the universe is 5000 years old, plenty long enough not to worry. By downloading software from <www.pgp.com> and by signing up for re-mailing your email at <www.ultimate-anonymity.com> or a similar place; any two world citizens with laptop computes can email each other completely privately and securely with no possibility of NSA being able to discern the sender, content, or receiver (at least for 5000 years). This fact negates the justification for NSA to be exempt from congressional oversight.
A
statement by James Bamford
(http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/23478res20060116.html):
My
decision to join the ACLU lawsuit against the National Security
Agency was not only difficult, but painful. During a quarter
century of writing about NSA, including the only two books on the
agency and countless articles, I have developed a great deal of
respect and even awe for the people who work there. A number of
junior cryptologists I came in contact with when I first began
writing The Puzzle Palace in 1979 had become senior officials by
the time I finished the sequel, Body of Secrets, in 2001. Some of
them had also become friends. During that period, my relationship
with NSA had also changed, from being threatened with
prosecution, to being honored with a book signing ceremony at the
agency.
In
The Puzzle Palace I devoted a considerable amount of pages to a
long list of illegal and improper activities conducted by the
agency during the Watergate period. But in Body of Secrets I went
to great lengths to explain how the agency had put that past
behind it and was now paying strict attention to the law. I even
defended the agency on many occasions, including when invited to
But
now it appears that the agency has gone full circle, and just as
I will defend it when I think it is being wrongly accused, I will
just as vigorously come out against it when I believe it has gone
over the line.
On
When
Operation Minaret was discovered during the mid-1970s, the
Justice Department under the Ford administration made the
extraordinary decision to launch a secret criminal investigation
of the entire agency. Shocked senior officials were given Miranda
warnings and investigators came up with 23 possible areas of
criminal prosecution. But because of the secrecy of the
information involved, and the fact that the law was very vague in
this area at the time, they decided against prosecution. Instead,
they recommended that the administration and Congress consider
enacting laws making such activities illegal and imposing long
prison sentences for those who ignore or go around the law.
Because
President Nixon attempted to justify his action by citing the
then ongoing war in Vietnam, as well as the Soviet nuclear threat
of the Cold War, the crafters included a provision that in time
of war – including an all-out Congressionally declared war
– the NSA is limited to just fifteen days of warrantless
eavesdropping. Later, both Republicans and Democrats enacted the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required the NSA to
obtain a warrant from a special court before eavesdropping on
Americans on
Then
in the fall of 2001, NSA director, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden
allegedly began ignoring the FISA law. Instead of allowing FISA
court judges to decide which Americans should be targeted, as the
law required, he secretly gave the responsibility back to agency
shift supervisors, as was done during Watergate. And months
later, President Bush issued an order approving and continuing
the operation, just as President Nixon had done.
What
greatly concerns me as someone who has written more about NSA
than any other writer is that in the past, when NSA was allowed
to operate in absolute secrecy, without oversight, it became a
rogue agency.
The point of this book is, NSA's reasons for not having congressional oversight have vanished. Any more there is no such activity of deciphering coded messages sent by criminals or those who just wish to be private: either by the government or anyone else. So if the American people want a rogue agency, then it should, like the CIA and all other agencies of our government, be enacted according to the Constitution and be under Congressional oversight.
Pathetically,
Congress is still being hoodwinked by NSA and the Executive
branch of the
Living
systems must categorize. Since we are neural beings, our
categories are formed through our embodiment (author's note,
another word for embodiment is brain circuits) . What
that means is that the categories we form are part of our
experiences! They are the structures that differentiate
aspects of our experience into discernible kinds. Categorization
is thus not a purely intellectual matter, occurring after the
fact of experience. Rather, the formation and use of
categories is the stuff of experience. It is part of what
our bodies and brains are constantly engaged in. We cannot,
as some meditative traditions suggest, 'get beyond' our
categories and have a purely uncategorized and unconceptualized
experience. Neural beings cannot do that.
Congressmen and Senators do not realize that the real reason that NSA does not want to go to court for violating the FISA laws, and would do anything to give immunity to the telecom companies, is because they do not want the outside world to realize that that part of their function (deciphering messages) that justified exemption from Congressional oversight, has vanished.
This book provides a detailed explanation of these ideas. Hopefully, you will be able to get a glimpse through 'my categories'. We will walk you through the concepts of traditional cryptography, thence to public key cryptography, thence through the visualization of the internet and how web commerce has been made possible, thence through the concepts of the embodied mind. With this back ground we hope to modify your 'neural categories' to more clearly see the way things really are and make some reasonable guesses about how communications technology will change things.
Chapter
1
Technical
Inventions as Communications Milestones
Communication history has been drastically changed by a few inventions. Most notable have been the wheel, the horse collar, the lath, the printing press, the steam engine, modern democracy, the internal combustion engine, the airplane wing, radio, and in the second half to the 20th century, vacuum deposition electronics (computers), and public key cryptography.
By modern
democracy I mean democracy as patterned after the Magna Charta
and written in the Constitution of the
I suppose few these days appreciate the sophistication of the horse collar. Few these days have washed off the caked sweat at the edges of the horse collar and rubbed liniment on the shoulders of their workmate after a hard days work, as we did for 1000 years.
What about the lath, why was it such an important milestone in history? In making the pyramids the Egyptians rolled huge stones over logs. These were the first roller bearings. Wheels are not much good to you if you don't have a nice round hole in the middle and a well fitting axle with roller bearings between them, as does every car on the road, or wagon, or train, or machine with wheels. With laths, it is a piece of cake.
In the case of the airplane wing, it is surprising that it was not until the beginning of the 20th century that the cross-sensational shape of all birds' wings were the same and that this was the secret to flight. The wing passing through the air creates a vacuum on the top and that gives a lift. Air is really heavy stuff, two pounds per cubic yard. The lift on the wing can be as much as 25 pounds per square foot of wing area when the wing moves through the air at moderate speeds. At high speeds it can be as much as 500 pounds of lift per square foot of wing surface.
There is no way that one can get a feel for what life was like before radio. If you had lived before radio, your impression of a new acquaintance would mostly be fourfold: Their appearance and mannerisms, what you now-a-days see as them. The clothes they wore had everything to do with their station in life. It was easy to tell what social class people belonged to, just by their clothes. We have only ruminants of that now. You judge people by their appearance but sometimes you are fooled. If one was a craftsman or artisan, or laborer, one could not afford clothes other than what was practical for your work. With mass production now anyone can afford clothes to give any impression that they wish.
The written word and penmanship ability were so important. Oh, how hard people worked on their penmanship. Did you ever marvel at the beauty of the hand written documents preserved in museums? It probably never occurred to you that most everyone wrote like that. One class a day in school was devoted to penmanship. The 'Palmer Method' was taught. Writing was done with no finger movement. Only the fleshy part of the forearm was moved. 'Google' it and try it.
And their accent. Everyone lived in, what you now call, a ghetto or a small town. The accent that you had was the way you talked between the ages of 12 and 16. You are stuck with it other than very extenuation circumstances. Today, and even more so tomorrow, accents will be homogenized and it will be more common for people to acquire more than one accent during the 12 to 16 year old formative period. This will become understandable as we look into neurophysiology and cognitive science; which we have to look into anyhow to get insight into congressional politics.
What they had, or had not, read and what poetry they could recite was so evident. When you talked to someone you got a feel for what books they had read. Most people only got out of the locale through reading books. They also got out by pilgrimage and postal letters, and of course, by fighting wars.
Radio was the great homogenizer. Television homogenized to where you cannot tell much at all about someone at first acquaintance. The internet has finished the job. Now I see a teenager who lives in the country, walking to the barn to do the evening milking, textmessaging and sending pictures by email to friends all over the world who are at home watching TV between back and forth emails and calling on the phone link of the web. Prior to radio this girl would be a 'country bumpkin' with no contacts beyond her school mates and family relatives. Look at any university campus; it is full of foreign students. These students, when they go home, do you think they are going to give up their school friends? No, because they will just continue textmessaging and emailing. Thanks to public key cryptography, they will be able to email absolutely privately. The privacy is not so important. What's important is that this world wide conglomerate called the internet would not have come about had it not been for the invention of public key crypto. And today's foreign students will be the cream of tomorrow's professional and managerial class. They will still be emailing absolutely privately and securely and buying things from all over the world.
When I talk to
people about RSA being a milestone in history as are these other
inventions, they look at me just exactly as the deer do staring
into my headlights at night along a country road. Even
modern-day computer geeks who know what RSA and PGP are, don't
see them as profound world-changers. The look is similar to
that given me when I tell a youngster who is sending email,
"Send me a carbon copy." "Carbon Copy"?
"No I mean a cc." "Oh, OK". I get
the same stare if I say, "Why do you capitalize both the O
and K in that word?" OK was tapped out by telegraphers
as a shorthand for 'end-of-message and often written out at the
end of the sentence, OK. Then telegraphers dropped the O
and in the first half of the 20th century, when CW was prevalent,
K became the symbol for 'end-of-message', OK. There was
another telegrapher's phrase for ending a message that moved into
common speech. It was-'shave and a haircut, two bits', OK.
This was tapped out by the telegrapher's key as 
in the hay day of CW, OK. At the
end of a message a telegrapher would send 
that sounded like 'shave and a
haircut' ; and the ending telegrapher would respond with 
, 'two bits, OK. "Don't look
at me that way, don't you know what CW means?" It
means continuous wave, a tone, OK. In voice wave
communications the voice jumbles the wave.
When people live in the middle of a change, it is too slow for them to see the over all picture. I really have to take you through some personal history, otherwise you will have to wait 20 more years or so to see the RSA invention as an historical milestone. You have to have been involved in communications for 70 years, as I have, to see the discontinuity in life style all over the Earth as wrought by RSA. Today people see as a milestone the message sent in 1844 by Samuel Morris to his assistant, "What hath God wrought." It would have been appropriate if Ron Revist, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman would have sent their first RSA encrypted message as "You ain't seen nothing yet, already, what God hath wrought." I'll tell you about it.
Chapter 2
Examples of Symmetric Codes
A symmetric code
is one where the sender and receiver have the same code book for
encryption and decryption. It is what one typically thinks
of as crypto. During the Civil War the newly formed Signal
Corps under Brigadier General Albert Myer was in charge of
communications for the Union Army. Secretary of War, Edwin
Stanton dismissed General Myer as Chief Signal Officer Nov. 10,
1863, and reassigned him to duty in
21-year-old Anson
Stager hired in to telegraph in 1846. A line was
constructed between
Figure
1.1 Elements of the code book used by General Grant's
cipher clerk for messages to Headquarters in
ciphers in their telegraphic messages. More
often than not, the telegraph operators themselves devised these
early ciphers and so were this nation’s cryptographic
pioneers. Stager developed a very simple cipher system, yet
it was never broken by the Confederacy. In fact, the
Confederacy was so baffled by Stager’s ciphers that
intercepted messages were often placed in Southern newspapers in
hopes that someone could decipher them. For example using a
Stager cipher, here’s a possible message that Gen. Ulysses
Grant could have sent to Gen. William Sherman in November 1863
during the battle of
To General Sherman,
Your division will cross the
General Grant,
The telegraph operator would then look in the USMT codebook and put the appropriate “arbitraries” into this message. The arbitraries from the codebook are listed in Figure 1.1.
The message with the corresponding arbitraries would be:
To BLACK your
WHARTON will cross GODWIN at MARY and WAFER and WALDEN QUADRANT
SAGINAW then WAYLAND JASMINE. Please advise on WHIST, WALRUS,
The message then was broken down into a division of five lines and six columns, Figure 1.2 Thus Grant’s message would be enciphered going up the sixth column, down the fifth, up the fourth, down the third, up the second and down the first. This zigzag route was code named Congress. The telegraph operator would then append CONGRESS as the first word in the message. The resulting message would then be sent over the telegraph as:
CONGRESS JENNIE RANDOLPH JASMINE AND CROSS WILL WAFER WAYLAND WALRUS BANGOR RAMSAY WHIST THENAND WHARTON YOUR MARY SAGINAW ON AND RATIONS ADVISE QUADRANT AT BLACK TO GODWIN WALDEN PLEASE RICHARD.
Figure 1.2 The message written out before commutation.
This particular cipher was known to only 14 people, access was denied to all other personnel, including President Lincoln.
From General Grant's memoirs:
“I
ordered the cipher operator to turn over the key to Captain Cyrus
B. Comstock of the Corps of Engineers, whom I had selected as a
wise and discreet man who certainly could be trusted with the
cipher if the operator at my headquarters could, The operator
refused point blank to turn over the key to Comstock as I
directed, stating that his orders from the War Department were
not to give it to anybody – the commanding general or any
one else. … He said that if he did, he would be punished. I
told him if he did not, he most certainly would be punished. When
I returned from
Figure 1.3 Typical Civil War communications wagon. It would be connected to a telegraph line at an army headquarters.
What really happened was as follows:
From his
headquarters in
I have ordered
the cipher operator to give the
Halleck responded to Grant by telegram the same afternoon:
The Secretary of War directs that you report by telegraph the facts and circumstances of the act of Lieutenant-Colonel Comstock, in requiring A.C. [sic: Samuel H.] Beckwith, telegraphic cipher clerk, to impart to him (Colonel Comstock) the secret cipher, entrusted to said Beckwith for use exclusively in your correspondence with the War Department and Headquarters of the Army.
Grant replied the next day:
I ordered
Beckwith to give Colonel Comstock the key to
Colonel Stager’s apologetic explanation to General Halleck is also dated 21 January:
The information furnished me led me to believe that the request of the staff officer for a copy of the cipher was without General Grant’s authority, and as a new cipher had been arranged expressly for Mr. Beckwith’s use at General Grant’s headquarters, with the order of the Secretary of War recently issued that the operators for this duty should be held responsible for strict privacy in its use, I indited the message referred to, not thinking that it would come in conflict with General Grant’s orders or wishes, the general having recently expressed his entire satisfaction with Mr. Beckwith’s services. I am exceedingly mortified at the result, as my only desire was to furnish the most reliable means of communication to General Grant with the War Department. The new cipher was arranged with a view of being used by telegraph experts, and it is believed cannot be used with any success by others than telegraphers. A great number of errors have been made by staff officers working ciphers, owing to their lack of experience in telegraphic characters, and it is believed that greater accuracy can be secured by placing ciphers in the hands of experts selected for this duty. The new cipher differs in many respects from those formerly used, and the one arranged for General Grant should not be known to any other party, hence my anxiety to keep it in Beckwith’s hands. I sincerely regret that General Grant is led to believe that it is willful interference on my part.
Halleck informed
Grant on
It was known that the contents of telegrams communicated by means of existing ciphers have been made public without authority. As these ciphers have been communicated to a number of persons the Department was unable to discover the delinquent individual. To obviate this difficulty a new and very complicated cipher was prepared for communications between you and the War Department, which, by direction of the Secretary of War, was to be communicated to only two individuals, one at your headquarters and one in the War Department. It was to be confided to no one else, not even to me or any member of my staff.” Mr. Beckwith, who was sent to your headquarters, was directed by the Secretary of War to communicate this cipher to no one. In obeying Colonel Comstock’s orders he disobeyed the Secretary and has been dismissed. He should have gone to prison if Colonel Comstock had seen fit to put him there. Instead of forcing the cipher from him in violation of the orders of the War Department, Colonel Comstock should have reported the facts of the case here for the information of the Secretary of War, who takes the personal supervision and direction of the military telegraphs. On account of this cipher having been communicated to Colonel Comstock the Secretary has directed another to be prepared in its place, which is to be communicated to no one, no matter what his rank, without his special authority.
The Secretary does not perceive the necessity of communicating a special cipher, intended only for telegrams to the War Department, to members of your staff any more than to my staff or to the staff officers of other generals commanding geographical departments. All your communications with others are conducted through the ordinary cipher. It was intended that Mr. Beckwith should accompany you wherever you required him, transportation being furnished for that purpose. If by any casualty be separated from you, communication could be kept up by the ordinary cipher till the vacancy could be supplied.
It is to be regretted that Colonel Comstock interfered with the orders of the War Department in this case. As stated in former instructions, if any telegraphic employee should not give satisfaction he should be reported, and, if there be a pressing necessity, he may be suspended. But as the corps of telegraphic operators receive their instructions directly from the Secretary of War, these instructions should not be interfered with except under very extraordinary circumstances, which should be immediately reported.
P.S. Colonel Stager is the confidential agent of the Secretary of War, and directs all telegraphic matters under his orders.
Grant responded to Halleck on 4 February:
Your letter of
the 22nd, inclosing copy of Colonel Stager’s of the 21st to
you, is received. I have also circular or order, dated
I will state
that Beckwith is one of the best of men. He is competent and
industrious. In the matter for which he has been discharged, he
only obeyed my orders and could not have done otherwise than he
did and remain. Beckwith has always been employed at headquarters
as an operator, and! have never thought of taking him with me
except when headquarters are moved. On the occasion of my going
to
Beckwith desired to telegraph Colonel Stager on the subject before complying with my direction. Not knowing of any order defining who and who alone could be entrusted with the Washington cipher, I then ordered Beckwith to give it to Colonel Comstock and to inform Colonel Stager of the fact that he had done so. I had no thought in this matter of violating any order or even wish of the Secretary of War. I could see no reason why I was not as capable of selecting the proper person to entrust with this secret as Colonel Stager: in fact, thought nothing further of the, than that Colonel Stager had his operators under such discipline that they were afraid to obey orders from any one but himself without knowing first his pleasure.
Beckwith has been dismissed for obeying my order. His position is important to him and a better man cannot be selected for it. I respectfully ask that Beckwith be restored.
When Colonel Stager’s directions were received here the cipher had already been communicated. His order was signed by himself and not by the Secretary War. It is not necessary for me to state that I am a stickler for form, but will obey any order or wish of my superior, no matter how conveyed, if! know, or only think it came from him. In this instance I supposed Colonel Stager was acting for himself and without the knowledge of any one else.
Having satisfied
A similar
incident happened to me at Arlington Hall Station, the center for
code breaking for the US Army In WW II. Officer of the Day
(OD) was in charge evenings and weekends. All field grade
officers were rotation into this duty about once-a-month. The NCO
to the Officer of the Day each night took a locked briefcase to
the code room of the Pentagon, just three miles away. For
those of you who know the area, from Arlington Hall one goes down
World War II Symmetric Code JN-25
In order to explain the attack on a symmetric code we use this example of a system used in World War II by the Japanese Naval Command. The famous JN-25. Unlike the telegraph code of the American Civil War, this code was broken by a combination of traffic analysis and deciphering.
The Japanese katakana syllabary (similar to syllables) were derived from abbreviated Chinese characters used by Buddhist monks to indicate the correct pronunciations of Chinese texts in the 9th century. At first there were many different symbols to represent one syllable of spoken Japanese, but over the years the system was streamlined. By the 14th century, there was a more or less one-to-one correspondence between spoken and written syllabary.
Figure 1.4 Japanese katakana syllabery
The word katakana means "part (of kanji) syllabic script". The "part" refers to the fact that katakana characters represent parts of kanji. The katakana syllabary consists of 48 syllables. In each column below the romaji (roman) or sound appears on the left, the katakana symbols in the middle and the old Chinese kanji from which the symbols were derived, on the right. We include the janji only for completeness.
 |
 |
Figure 1.5 The Japanese katakana syllabary as used in Morris code telegraphy.
Just as the Latin
alphabet had the Morris Code for radio messages, e.g.,
a • - , b -••• , c
-•-•, d -••, e •, f
••-• , g - ••, h
••••, i••, j•--- , k
-•- , l •-•• , m -- , n - • , o--- , p
•--•, q --•- , r •-• , s
••• , t - , u ••- , v
•••- , w •-- , x -••- , y -•--
, z --•• ; Japanese had a 
code.
The katakana
"Morris equivalent" was used for messages in the plane
text. For example if they wanted to send the word katakana,
in the table above, ka is 
or 
and so on. They would send 
. Each telegrapher has his own
fist, or "accent". The bottom line is that the
Japanese telegraphers used a different "Morris code"
than we did. It was not until 1928 that the U.S.Navy had
any operators that could receive this. Then Chief Radioman
Harry Kidder, stationed in the Philippians took it upon himself
to learn. With the help of the Japanese wife of a shipmate,
he learned the Katakana syllabary, taught himself the telegraphic
equivalents of all the Katakana characters, and began to
intercept Japanese messages. He ended up in 1928 as
director of school in
I use to listen
to the war stories and reminiscence of the old NCOs at the
"rocker clubs" in the area. One argument was over
a Japanese shipboard heavy handed operator whom they swore sent
out messages sometimes with his foot and sometimes by hand.
They associated the two by mannerisms other than his fist.
They had names for the operators to whom they listened a lot.
Names like the "Hornpiper" , "Waltzing
Moose", "Skip to me Glue", "Speedy
Gonzales", and my favorite was "Rubber Astoll"
whose ship hung around the Atolls. As we will see, this fun
and games was really serious business. There would have
been no breaking of the Japanese naval code JN-25 with out
traffic analysis. Radio direction finding bearings taken at
the same time as message reception; knowing an enemy
operator's work shift schedule and the exact time of the message;
all helped. As we will see, up to
The WACS and WAVES will win the war, parole vous,
The WACS and WAVES will win the war, parole vous,
The WACS and WAVES will win the war,
So what the heck are we fighting for?
Inkie dinkie stinkie parole vous.
Well at least one WAVE I know helped win the war. It was Agnes Driscoll (neé Meyer)
|
|
Figure
1.5
Agnes Meyer
Driscoll's work as a navy cryptanalyst who broke a multitude of
Japanese naval systems, as well as a developer of early machine
systems, marks her as one of the true "originals" in
American cryptology. She was born in 1889, and, in 1911, she
graduated from
In June 1918 Agnes Meyer enlisted in the United States Navy. She was recruited at the highest possible rank of chief yeoman and was assigned to the Code and Signal section of the Director of Naval Communications. In 1918 women all went into the Navy as Yeoman(F). Mrs. Driscoll broke Japanese Navy manual codes -- the Red Book Code in the 1920s, the Blue Book Code in 1930, and, in 1940, she made critical inroads into JN-25. When her name was mentioned by the NCO's in the Rocker Club, they would laugh and say, "shit a mighty". She tried to learn to cuss like a sailor but always got it all wrong. They just loved her. When she found out the five number code groups for numbers were 00000 00102 for 1, 00204 for 2, 00306 for 3 and so on, she said, shit a might. We'll tell you about that later.
Red was a Japanese naval code created during World War I and used until the outbreak of World War II. The Red code used the additive encryption method. The code assigned everything, words, syllables, and numerical values to a five digit number, in a dictionary-like code book. Before transmissions, these 5-digit number groups were encrypted a second time using an additive codebook. The book contained a series of numbers that were added to the original numerical message in sequence. The adding and subtracting was called "false addition" by the crypto clerks. Each message contained a key that told the receiver where to begin the additive sequence in the book to decode the message. Cryptologists named the code Red after the color of the folder in which deciphered codes were bound.
In 1923, a United
States Navy intelligence officer located a copy of the 1918
Imperial Japanese Navy secret operating code in the luggage of a
visiting Japanese attaché. The codebook was clandestinely
photographed and a special cryptology unit, known as the Research
Desk, was created to begin the task of monitoring and deciphering
intercepted messages. At the time, U.S. Navel Intelligence
monitored only ship-to-ship communications and some radio
transmissions in
Cryptologists
worked for five years to fully translate and break Red, the
additive cipher that the 1918 codebook contained. Intercepts
continued to use the aging code, facilitating the work of
The Japanese
replaced Red with a more sophisticated code on
On
Figure 1.6 Encrypted message sent from the aircraft carrior Kaga to port giving time of arrival
The additive entry is a random number taken from the 300 page book of random numbers. Note that
Figure 1.7 The message as decypted by the cypher clerk at the port.
The addition and
subtraction is done without carrying, hence "false
adding". This is really modular arithmetic which we
learn about when we learn to do the RSA encryption. In
other words, 5+6=1(mod 10) and 8-9=9(mod 10). Think of (mod
10) arithmetic as moving the hand on a clock with 10 hours as
shown below. On the clock, 2+11=3. 2-3=9, 2-5=7,
6+6=2, 6+35= 1 . 
If the cipher clerk who prepared the message would start at page one and tear out that page after using it for the additives of one message, tear out the page and no one ever use it again, the code could not ever be broken, no how, no way, by no one. In crypto this is know as the "one-time-pad" But this would never work because, say, the above message sent by His Imperial Majesty's Ship Kaga used page 60 from the additives book, there was no way for other cipher clerks on other ships to know that if they used page 60 after that, the good ship Kaga could not decode-- a logistical nightmare. So they did the next best thing, an OK procedure theoretically, randomly pick a page from the 300 page additives book each time. Cipher clerks were given strict orders to do that. The security of the system depended above all on not reusing any one stretch of the additive book too often. The Italians used a one-time-pad for each day of the year and their codes were never broken. I cannot stress this too much, because we will find that in modern day asymmetric cryptography, code books are not used so the equivalent of the "one time pad" in the selection of random numbers is epso facto built in. In Chapter 4 we will use this particular message as if it were sent using the RSA asymmetric cipher.
Only through the laziness of Japanese code clerks did the Navy's cryptanalysts make their first crucial break. Throughout the summer of 1939 the codebreakers in Washington, under the direction of Commander Laurence Safford, punched every intercepted message onto IBM cards and began groping for even the slightest irregularity that would give them a toehold. If you do not know what cc means on your email, you will not know what IBM cards are either. They were about the size of a dollar bill. There were holes along the edge so they could be carried on cog wheels or conveyer belts. The cards were covered with a grid of 1mm x 3mm printed boxes where the punch machine would punch holes to designate numbers. You had a paper punch to manually punch holes in these wee marked rectangles also. The cleverness of the IBM cards, they could be sorted into any arrangement you wanted. Sort of like playing the card game "go fishing". Give me all your 2's? I don't have any, go fishing.
After searching every way they could imagine, they found one vague unevenness, so slight as to be almost invisible. If the cipher clerks really had done their jobs, the code groups of five digit numbers would be random. They were not. When the codebreakers printed out a complete catalog of the five digit numbers in each day's traffic, they found that the numbers tended to bunch up. In other words, the clerks were tending to use the same additive pages over and over. Not surprisingly, these pages corresponded to the front of the additive book, the easiest place to flip open a book. That was a small toehold indeed. But to a codebreaker it meant everything; it meant the theoretical possibility of beginning to tease apart the underlying code groups from the additive decipherment that concealed its true value. The trick was to find, among the thousands of messages, two that overlapped, two that had been enciphered with the same stretch of additive. If it was the cryptanalyst's lucky day, a pair of these overlapping messages might contain identical pairs of code groups that had been enciphered by one additive in one spot, another additive in another. Or better still would be the same message relayed to a third or forth ship, each one using new additives. From such slender reads the cryptanalysts—one year and hundreds of thousands of IBM cards later—had identified the numerical values of a few dozen code groups and a few dozen additives.
The real break in JN-25 came on a single day in early fall 1940, and when it came it proved a remarkable blend of absolute brilliance, combined with sheer doggedness and just a touch of thievery. To start, IBM runs had found another curious bunching. The only place where enough overlaps occurred to allow additives to be recovered were in the first four groups of messages. The IBM searches revealed that the same code groups were being used at the start of some messages. That led immediately to the hypothesis that these code groups stood for numerals: It was natural to begin a message by saying something such as "Reference your message 1234."
Suddenly, someone remembered the code for numbers in the old 1918 four-digit code book. Agnes Meyer Driscoll no doubt, being in crypto since 1918. This old code was dug out of the files, and sure enough: the numerals followed a set formula. Zero was 0000; one was 0102; two was 0204; three was 0306; and so on. The few dozen code groups that the Navy cryptanalysts had pulled out of JN-25 had been assigned tentative values. But these were only relative values. One code group that appeared often was 13343; other frequent groups were 13445 and 13547. But the true values of these groups in the actual Japanese code books might just as well have been 13342, 13444, and 13546; or 13000, 13102, 13204; or any other constant difference from them. No mechanism allowed the analysts to anchor them to an absolute value. The discovery of the old stolen code book provided that missing anchor. Immediately, the codebreakers noticed that the groups 13343, 13445, and 13547 differed from one another by exactly 00102. If 13343 stood for "one," then 13241 ought to be "zero." The tentative group 13241 had in fact been recovered in a few messages. From there the code split wide open: subtracting 13241 from each of the tentative groups, the sequence 00000, 00102, 00204, 00306 fell right out, shit a mighty.
In a single day, the code groups for all numerals from zero to 999 had been cracked—a full 3% of the entire JN-25 book. Moreover, the codebreakers recognized another bonanza: In every one of these true code groups for numerals, when their digits were summed, the total was a number divisible by three. When the Navy codebreakers subtracted the 13241 from other code groups that had been tentatively recovered, the resulting values had this same property. In other words, if you start with 00102 and use only numbers skiping two for the code groups to put in your dictionary, e.g. 00102, 00105, 00108, 00111, 00114, and so on, the numbers are all divisible by 3 and the sum of their digits is a multiple of 3. Go back and look at the example above giving the estimated time of arrival of the good ship Kaga. Note that the sum of all digits in a code book entry is always a multiple of 3. This makes the attack much easier. Some such built-in pattern is standard in all book codes; it serves as a "garble check" so the Japanese cipher clerk can make sure he has sent the message correctly. The Navy cryptanalysts had been tearing their hair out looking for the garble check feature in JN-25. This was it, shit a mighty. From that point, IBM sort card runs could be far more efficient; the only valid additives to search for were ones that, when subtracted from an enciphered message group, yielded a number the sum of whose digits was divisible by three, a property known as "scanning."
| 11 | were | found | and | 23 | were | missing | |||
| 01122 | 02346 | ||||||||
| 41005? | 57366? | ||||||||
| 42127 | 32751 | 01623 | 37762 | 59602 | 94620 | 06481 | 20469 | 02474 | 84965 |
In other words, if the analyst knows that the first and fifth code groups to be 11 and 23 from traffic analysis and they receive 42127 and 59602 for the two groups; then they have established 41005 and 57366 as two additives separated by 3 other additives . Of course the analyst does not know yet what page and location in the additive book. With enough traffic they can start "growing" the code book and additives.
| torpedoes | misfired | often | when | they | were | deep | ||
| 06969 | 55119 | |||||||
| 41005 | 57366 | |||||||
| 48398 | 95673 | 47964 | 94571 | 46732 | 02475 | 42756 | 38602 | 45961 |
With enough traffic and, especially if the cipher clerks use the same page often, and if you know the context of the message, we can try 41005 and 57366 additives and make a good guess at where "torpedoes" and "when" are in the message. Then you assume that 06969 is torpedoes and 55119 is "when" in the code book.
The Japanese appreciated the need for completely random numbers for their additive book, they introduced a new additive book every few months; by the fall of 1940, version number five was already in effect. The Research Desk decided that rather than try to read current traffic, it would gain the most ground by piecing together the first two additive books, which it already had started to do. Once they pieced together the old additive book from old traffic; then they would have the old code book. The old code book was the same as the current code book. Only the additive book of the random numbers was changed. To periodically change the code book would have been a mammoth logistic nightmare. A mass of back traffic had been accumulated, and no attempt was made at this point to read current messages. U.S. Navy in fall 1940 had a cryptanalytic staff that totaled only 36 people; most of those were busy with other tasks, including the all-important MAGIC traffic, and only two to five could be spared to tackle JN-25. MAGIC was the Japanese Diplomatic Code machine. (Agnes Meyer Driscoll also was a major contributor to building this machine, did she never sleep, shit a mighty.)
Within a few
months, nonetheless, enough progress had been made with back
traffic that the underlying code was being read with comparative
ease. In late fall orders went out to the JN-25 codebreakers in
Those hopes went
up in a puff of smoke on
But once again, a
Japanese blunder prevented the setback from being irrecoverable.
Although the Japanese had changed the code book, they did not
change the additive ciphers at the same time. Able-5 had been
replaced by Baker-5, not Baker-6. For two full months, the
messages were sent in a new code but using the same additives
that
Figuring out the meanings of code groups was aided by some highly patterned features of the Japanese messages. Codes for numerals already had provided one break. Codes for frequently used terms such as "stop" opened the door wider. Messages that contained some of the same code groups were like a huge interlocking crossword puzzle in Japanese. At this point, the Navy's Japanese linguists were called upon increasingly; it was a matter of trying a likely word in one message and seeing if it made sense where the same code group appeared in another.
Meanwhile, in the
spring of 1941, a highly secret collaboration between
By August 1941 about 10,000 additives had been recovered in book number 5 and about 2,000 code groups were being read in Baker. But on 1 August, the additive book changed again. The work progressed at the same dogged pace as before, steadily and surely, yet nowhere nearly fast enough, given what lay ahead. By 1 November only about 3,000 code groups had been assigned meanings out of the 30,000 or more in the new Baker code book. By 1 December the figure had grown to about 3,800. But only about 2,500 additives of the 50,000 in the new additive book had been recovered.
The actual
reading of current Japanese messages before
But Midway was
also one of these moments that concentrate forces of history,
that in one intense burst crystallize what might have otherwise
taken years to coalesce from the fog of events. Midway
decisively announced the end of the age of the battleship. The
battleship's brawn was simply no match for the long reach of the
carrier. Of even further-reaching consequence, the American
victory at Midway moved code breaking and signals intelligence
from an arcane, little-understood, and usually unappreciated
specialty to the very center of military operations. ("
Chapter
3
The Birth of NSA
April Fools Day,
1952. I sat down on a stone wall. Retainer wall for
the dugout road behind the Science Hall at Fairmont State College
just 20 miles from where I went to high school in
You would think I would have thought about what would happen next, after graduating, but I had not, at least not in the particular. Work wouldn’t really be work any more. When I was seven, I went door to door selling Saturday Evening Post. When I was eight, I graduated to Ladies Home Journal. I never did get any money because I could not keep the money straight. This man came around in a big fancy car and collected the money. Magazines were a nickel. So if he gave me ten, I sold seven. Had to give him 4 cents for at least eight. Always lost track of one or two. I wanted to get out of that door-to-door stuff in the worse way. “Want to buy a Saturday Evening Post?” “I told you yesterday kid, quit coming around here with those god dammed Saturday Evening Post.” Then it was the Grit. Then the glory days of a real paper route. So I thought. Always someone who said, “I’ll pay next week, kid.” I knew he wouldn’t. So I cut down from 35 to 34 and skipped him. “Mr. Jumjagger called and said you skipped him", the editor said. “He didn’t pay last week”. “He’ll pay, deliver.”
I had red cards
about the size of a dollar bill on a ring for each customer.
The dates were around the edge. When they paid, I punched
out the date with a hole puncher. A bag, a hole puncher,
and a ring of cards were the stalk and trade of a paper boy.
I had lots of problems. One was, that about two-thirds paid
on time. But the newspaper made the delivery boy pay at the
window when they got their papers. I aspired to be a
paperboy because that was what the big boys did. Little did
I know that I would lose more than I did on The Saturday Evening
Post and that I would have to get jobs cutting grass to pay the
difference. Another problem was that I would sing, whistle
and daydream and walk right by customers. Especially after
a movie, with arias like
I couldn’t resist stopping at the swimming hole along my paper route where all my buddies were. I couldn't resist doing a flip off that swing and swimming under water where your eyes didn’t burn. As often as not, money got taken from my paper bag by the big boys, and there went two extra days of cutting grass to pay for going swimming.
Then there was this crazy kid that wanted to trade me my paper route for a job inside the newspaper office. All you had to do was print addresses off these dog-tag-looking things that ran through a machine and printed addresses on a half sheet of paper. You rolled a newspaper into the half sheet and glued it. You carried a canvas mailbag, bigger than you were, to the depot for the train. Cold hard cash, even if I made mistakes. A step up was my next job of delivering groceries in a wagon for a mom-and-pop grocery store. That was cold hard work but fun. Some customers were two or three miles from the store but I got to go in their kitchens. Sometimes they gave me cake and pie. Mostly these housewives wanted someone to talk to. The way I saw it, I got paid just to be their friend. It would have been a perfect joy had they let me tune the radio off the stupid drug-store-cowboy music and on to some Broadway stuff or folk music by local performers.
Jobs got easier,
janitor in a local movie house, stock boy in a clothing store.
Then a sporting goods store where I could talk to all the hunters
and fishermen. Cut right-of-way for the power company in
college, that was hard physical work but fun; much like it is fun
to play ball but hard physical work. Then a plush job in my
senior year of boat dock attendant and life guard on the
On that April Fool’s Day 1952, sitting on the wall, it dawned on me; no asking 50 people for a job this summer! Maybe I could get paid for doing what I did anyhow for nothing—making radios and antennas, or antennae as they still said then. Maybe I could get paid for moving up the spectrum to microwave. That started a long climb up the spectrum to heterodyne radios of one-one hundredth of a millimeter wavelength where the smallest hair is a long wave antenna.
My first antenna was 40 meters wavelength. This was my second year in high school and the boys were coming home from the war. One teacher was Lt. J. G. Lynn Faulkner. Later I found out that he had worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory—the American contribution to radar, catching up with the famed radar home-chain along the White Cliffs of Dover during the 1940 Battle of Britain. I worked there later myself when it was part of MIT. He knew everything. He showed us how to build radios from scratch, even blow glass for homemade tubes. In my own little world, I thought everyone knew math. I went to trigonometry class like a feminist in the 70’s went to a consciousness-raising meeting. Just to share exciting things that they all knew about. No one told me you were suppose to wait until you went to class to learn it. No one told me, either, that you had to learn to read and write to graduate from high school. One afternoon I bugged out of class and went to the dinner down the street. I was in a booth enjoying a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Oh, shit. Mr. (aka Shorty) Clayton was in a booth doing the same thing. He was too short for me to see over the booth so I missed him. Had I the nose of my hound dog, I would have smelled him out before ordering my coffee. I always had a job so I had money for cigarettes and coffee. As he got up to pay the casher, he saw me, not my cigarette, I slipped it on the floor. He said, "Nelson, what will you ever do when you get out of school? I said, "Be a mathematician." He didn't say, You're truant. You shouldn't be here or anything. He just stared at me for a while and then walked out. Again I thought, oh shit, I'm in for it now. And I was.
That afternoon after school in our radio room, Mr. Faulkner told me. "You are not going to graduate. Miss Batten (the English teacher) told me you could not read and write, is that right?” "No that's not right." "Then tell me what that says." He pointed to some words. I faked reading, “Yes sir, I can read and write, that says the imaginary part of the impedance, shows the phase relationship.” “Which word is impedance and which word is imaginary?” “Well it wouldn’t say the impedance part of the imaginary. The next day Miss Batten stuck the script of a play, Dear Ruth, in my hand and said, “You have the lead part. Have act one memorized by this weekend."
Now I was in deep
shit. We lived in a large three story old wood house.
No furnace. In the down stairs parlor there was a coal
burning grate. They put out a lot of heat, but the bedrooms
were cold. The four boys, Rogers, Jim, me, and Dick, had
the biggest bedroom and it had a gas fire place. Our
bedroom was the only cozy place in the house in winter except for
the parlor and kitchen. When I was a senior Dick was
a freshman. He was the pride of the whole family. He
took operatic voice lessons every Saturday in
So this was the back ground one evening when I came home with the script to Dear Ruth. "Dick, what is this word: s i t u a t i o n?" , I spelled. "You know what that word is?" "If I did, I wouldn't ask", I said. "Look it up in the dictionary." "That's crazy", I said. "Why? he ask." "That's about the stupidest thing I ever heard anyone say". "Why"?, I insisted. OK", I found it in the dictionary and pointed to it. "I got it right here in the dictionary", (Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 1936): sit'u-a'tion (-a ' shûn), n, 1. Manner in which an object is placed; location; also, a locality. 2. . I say to Dick, jabbing my finger to the word in the dictionary. "I'm looking at it, that doesn't tell me how to say the word." "Now read that and tell me what 'sisen' (trying to pronounce it) means, go ahead read to me what it means". Dick reads, "Manner in which an object is placed." "OK, that just tells me everything about 'sisen' , doesn't it?", raving like a preacher. "How to say it and what it means? I'm go'na put my fist down easy, I'm "sisen it? Now I'm going to slam it down and bust it, is that "sisen" it?. " That is exactly what everyone says to me if I ask them how to say a written word, look it up in the dictionary", I say mocking the sanctimonious revival preacher. "OK, I'll read it to you." Next evening, same thing. Next evening, same thing. "I'm not reading to you any more. I'm sick and tired of spending my evenings reading that stupid play over and over." "But I can read it myself now, the first four pages. Listen to this. "I don't want to listen to that. I'm sick of that." I went up the third floor balcony and started taking apart the matching network for the rhombic antenna. "You can't do that", Dick said, he was beside himself. "All I need is two more nights and Act I will be finished." That is how I learned to read. The play was a smash. I was a smash and graduated from high school.
Four years later
in 1952 I was setting at home on the balcony by my rhombic
antenna transmission line. My revelation while sitting on
the Science Hall wall a few weeks before, that morning in May,
where this story starts, had come true. I could go down to
the YMCA and shoot pool or play ball. I could take a boat
and row for hundreds of miles in the
"You got a letter from the draft board." He knew all about the draft. He still has a yellow tint for a bad case of malaria in the South Pacific. "You open it", I said. "I'm not allowed to open people's mail. What does it say", handing me the letter. "It says my four year deferment for college is over and I have to report for induction. I got books I want to read. The guys they want me to go over there and kill, they got books they want to read too."
"You got to
go, you know that." "OK Uncle Joe, you make the
choice. (1) I go and get killed and the Communists rules all of
So down to the post office I went. "Hi Serg." "Hi Nelson, lets go get a hotdog." He always tried to bribe recruits with hotdogs so he was a potbellied recruiting sergeant and he always did his homework and knew who was up for the draft. "You been fishing"? "No, I'm going to take a sack of grub and boat and stay out on the lake for a few days. I got lots of time and don't have a job. There is this cave with a hangover, you pull your boat under the hangover and the cave mouth is just four feet above the water line. There are rocks that make steps up to the cave. The water drips constantly from a place in the roof of the cave about 10 feet in from the mouth. Someone has put a big bolder with a basin under the drip and there you have a basin of clean water all the time, summer and winter." The best time is when it is raining. You can set a trot line to get your fish, have a cook fire next to the water basin. Just bring a few candles and snooze during the rain and do what you want." "You don't have all that much time, the draft will get you."
"How'd you know that?" "I know everything about all the draftees." "You like killing people, Serg?" "No, why would you ask a question like that?" "That's your job. That's what George Patton used to say, the job of a solder is to kill people as fast as he can. I'm not like you, I don't want to kill people." "I don't want to kill people either, I'm not like you either. I don't have a big house with a mom and dad that both work and a college degree and can't loaf around go up the lake. You're a college boy, you ought to know what Charles Dickens said, only rich people can afford high morals."
"Thanks for the hotdog and coke Serg", starting to get up from the booth. "Wait a minute, wait a minute I might have what you are looking for. We just got this good deal for college graduates, or anyone with two years of college who can pass a certain test. If they have specialized in electronics or languages or math, they can join this new branch of the Army called ASA." "Do I have to kill people?", I said. "This branch of the Army broke off from the Signal Corps. It has to do with coded messages I have been told but I'm not supposed to give that information out to recruits." "You just did" "Like Charles Dickens said, I got to meet my quota." "If I join up, I'll have to join for four years. My two brothers had to join the Navy for four years." "No, you can join for three years." "Why only three years", I said. "I don't know, I don't run the Army. Maybe they need people bad."
I took my bag of grub, candles, books, a boat and a trot line and went out to my cave. I only stayed a few days. I guess I was the original hyperactive kid, I get bored real fast.
Joining ASA was probably a good choice because, as you will see, I was involved in the setting up of the new federal agency decreed by congress in 1952, NSA. In addition, most of the third year, I was allowed TDY (temporary duty) to go to graduate school, free from any Army duties at a full Sergeant's salary. After my tour was up, I went on to graduate school on the GI bill, consulting for NSA at times, and then right back into NSA.
The summer of
1952 went fast. Basic training was a breeze. I was
called in and asked if I wanted to go to OCS (
When I told him I had that option, he raved, "You have no business being an officer." "Why", I said in surprise. "You just don't have any business". "Well, that's no answer." "You can't hear out of one ear and you can't see out of one eye and an officer has to take responsibility for his men; and you can't do that." No one knew I had those maladies outside the family and I resented him trying to restrict my life because of them, as he always did. But I knew that his real resentment was brewing for years because I had stopped him from abusing my mother when he was drunk. I turned down OCS because I did not want to increase the probability of having to kill people. I had better chances of not having to do that in ASA. I suppose at heart I was a conscientious objector.
It had
nothing to do with religion. I had already acquired a
religious philosophy after studying anthropology, mythology,
Saint Thomas Aquinas, other philosophers. My philosophy
went something like this. When a child in Western culture
is about six years old, if they are astute, it occurs to them at
Christmas times that Santa Clause is a myth. No way could
he get around the World in one night with a 7 reindeer powdered
machine. Likewise, when astute Christians reach adulthood,
they see Christianity as a myth. No mater how valid
the tenets of the faith are, it is a myth. No way could
Noah's
"I'm Gudu, nice to meet you Nelson."
"When did you get here Gudu?"
"I been here for 231,816 years, 2 months and 13 days."
"How can you keep that straight?"
"That's easy to keep in my head, I'm good at math, but I'm not human. I got a bum rap. They had a review 1700 years ago. I had been in Purgatory before that, you know. My cell mate during the review was Saint Peter's grandmother. She told me she said, 'Peter, I took care of you when you were born and had I not, you wouldn't be here today. I was good to everybody all my life and now I have had to spend all these years in Purgatory and then Hell, just because I never heard of Christ, never got saved, you were not up here when I died.' Why didn’t you tell me about Jesus Christ so I could have been saved also?"
Gudu went on, "I keep telling them, I'm not human! My mother was Homo Erectus. Now its true that my dad was a Cro-Magnon but that only makes me half Human. Besides, there are all these jurisdictional problems. I keep telling Saint Peter, the racial designation goes with the mother, not the father. There was also this guy, if you can call a non-Human that, Homer was his name, in the cell with me and Saint Peter's grandmother. He was only 1/8th Human and that was because this Human came in and raped his great-grandmother. Not only that, but the family of the human who raped her said they did not think it was right for her to get an abortion. These Homo Erectus has lots of good portents for abortion, you know.
Homer said, "Look Saint Peter, The Humans insisted that my great-grandmother not get an abortion, even in case of rape and incest. He was a smooth talker and Saint Peter let him through. The last thing he said to me, he was crying, he said I really don't want to go to Heaven either. I am a pre-Human. There have been billions of us. Most of them are a much bigger part human than I am. I just want to be dead like any other animal. Why do the humans insist on us part humans going to Heaven, why! Why did we have to stay in Purgatory until Christ came? Why? What's with these Christians? How could they be so self righteous? Worse than burning women at the stake by the thousands, they insist that a billion of us half humans have to go to Heaven of Hell."
So the reason I did not want to kill people was because I didn't understand these things. If I shot someone, as he sat there and watched the blood run out, I knew he was not thinking about the platitudes either. So I chose not to go to OCS.
I was surprised
by the cold
The
quasi-awol-repo-depot-recruits at the PX round table were sure we
could work out definite answers to the problems of the World?
At the round table most every day were John Katz, a recent
graduate of Harvard Business School, his family ran the Katz
Clothing Store in Baltimore and his buddy Sean Degnan from
N.Y.City, Bob Powell, a UCLS physics graduate. Bob Powell
was 6 feet, 2 inch and another UCLA graduate, Moon Cha, was a
Linguist who has done a thesis on the Chang Dynasty. Moon
came up to Bob Powell's belt. He got pissed when we patted
him on the head. Another was Bill McKinney, a black
electrical engineer, and about four or five others. We all
wanted to get stationed at Arlington Hall Station in
Gudu, Homer, and
Saint Peter's Grandmother were attacked mercilessly by some, for
their sacrilege attitudes. Another popular subject
was the Brown vs Board of Education trial that was going on.
I thought, boy, we are going to get the answer to all the world's
problems and especially the race problem in the
"Nigress, nigress" Bill kept repeating. "You son of a bitch, you don't refer to John's sister as a Jewess. Moon Cha, is your wife a Chinkess"? By that time Bill's voice was up 20 decibels and all the customers in the PX lounge were entertained.
Probably the NCO at the PX called the 1st Sergeant at the repo-depot. I really had the feeling that the cadre didn't care what the recruits did as long as there was an image of everybody doing structured things on Post. After the details marched back and were dismissed it was safe to come back to the company area because there was lots of random walking around, we would come back from the PX, then go to chow, then fall in for evening formation. One of the announcements at the evening formation on the same day that Bill McKinney's nigress was discussed was, "Private McAvoy , Private McKinney, . . . report at 0900 tomorrow to the First Sergeant. Another was, "We are required to announce (as if to say, but don't pay any attention to it) that the Inspector General will be available in the morning for interviews.
"Major Johnson, sir", the sergeant said and the major stopped dead in his tracks with the door half open."Yes, sergeant." "There is a solder here who wishes an appointment." The Major looked at me for a few seconds and reversed his steps and walked into a side office. "In here soldier", he said as he seated himself behind the plan small beat up desk and through his briefcase on it.
I came in and saluted and said, "Request permission to speak to the IG, sir." "Be seated."
"Sir, when I took the
battery of test I know I did well on the radio operators test
because, as an amateur radio operator I receive 20 words a
minute." "I have a station too, what's your
call sign?",said the Major."W8UOE", I lied, that
was my teachers call sign. I would have had to go to
"You're from
"I see. Write that information along with your name, rank, and serial number on this form and leave it with the Sergeant."
"Yes sir."
"Dismissed", he said as he was writing without looking up. I saluted and left.
No one was in the Company area and all the details were out so I headed for the PX.
The next morning
I was up at
In a few days I
got orders to report to Hq. & Hq. Company, Arlington Hall
Station,
Hq. & Hq. Company was composed of the cooks, motor pool, base maintenance, MPs and ASA operative enlisted men. ASA operatives and cooks lived in one barracks and the MPs in another. There were more MPs than any others personnel because everyone who was on the base who was not a permanent staff has to be escorted at all times by an MP. The permanent buildings of Arlington Hall were a beautiful old girls prep school that has been requisitioned during WW II and was the place where code breaking
Arlington
Hall Station,
during WW II was centered. I had a second set of orders the second day and was escorted to the offices of a civilian, Neil Ganzert. Neil was a Virginia Military Institute graduate and was an Army major in radio intelligence during WW II. He was the only person remotely close to a father figure that I ever had. My first week at work he wrote orders to give me the MOS (military occupational specialty) of a Traffic Analyst.
Settling into the
bachelor life of a young adult in
I didn't want to
flunk out in the worst way, the whole place was sunshine, palm
trees, beaches, and gorgeous girls. Talk about culture
shock, the easy ways of
"I
teach", he finally said and I knew not to ask any more
questions. In ASA they took the 'need to know' seriously.
It caused mix ups sometimes. The Company Commander at
Arlington Hall had not idea what the solders under him did during
the day. That is probably why I was assigned to the
Commanding General of ASA, General Rikeldorffer under Neil
Ganzert with an MOS of Traffic Analyst, arranged by the IG in the
repo-depot in
Back to Moon Cha. I followed him around in the evenings because Chinese food was so wonderful and such a novelty for me. I remember in school one time the teacher asked a girl what the four main food groups were, she said, beans, tomatoes, corn and potatoes. Chinese food did not have any beans, tomatoes, corn, and potatoes. Dinner was a social thing and free at all the Chinese restaurants when I was with Moon Cha. The help huddled around Moon Cha and he did not order from the menu.
"What do you
tell those people to get them all to huddle around the table and
give you free food, Moon Cha?"
"In
The best part for me was the girls. No mater what color their hair was, the hair on their tan legs was white, from either bleach or sun bleached, probably the later. They hung out in clusters. I would just go up to a cluster and stand there with them and they would start talking to me. That had only happened to me with hometown girls.
"What's your name?" "Nelson." "Nelson Eddie", she giggled. "You look like Nelson Eddie" (which I did). I was not sophisticated enough not to stare at their boobs in the skimpy bathing suit tops.
"You like what you see?" one girl said. If you stare at them enough my nipples will get hard. You want that?" A couple of others said, lets see who can get hard nipples from Nelson Eddie staring at them. It seemed so natural, I don't think I blushed at all. The next evening they started it again.
"You want to see more, you're making them hard looking at them again."
"How Long wants to see them", I leaned on his shoulder to jester that he was my buddy. They were all taller than Moon Cha. He came up to about nipple height. They all clustered around him. I couldn't even see him inside the tight giggling circle.
Oh God, what a wonderful life this army is, Chinese food; giggly, white peach fuzz covered, tan, unattached, uninhibited, girls; soccer; learning a language; beaches; balmy winter. To good to be true. The next afternoon I was called out of class to report to the Company Commander.
"Private McAvoy reporting as ordered, sir", as I saluted .
"You're not a private anymore, you are a sergeant, and congratulations."
"Yes sir"
"And I also have orders for you to report forthwith back to Headquarters and Headquarters Company at Arlington Hall Station. That's all pri . . , I mean, Sergeant."
"But, Sir, I am stationed here and want to graduate with m . ."
"Dismissed." He cut me off with a smirk. "I don't like it either when they pull students out and stick them in a class in the middle of a program. Dismissed."
"Yes sir", I saluted did an about face and went out devastated. As I went out of the Orderly Room the Sgt. Major said, "Here's your orders.", as he slid them across the desk. "Why would they want to make a snot nosed kid like you a sergeant. I was in the Army seven years before I made sergeant".
I was so upset about having to leave, I vented it on him. I stared at him for a pause and said, "It's because I like killing people faster and better than you, Serg." I did not go back to class, took my last long walk on the beach with tears running down my face.
When I came back, "Moon Cha, let's not eat chow, let's go get some Chinese food." "I can't I got'a study." He knew something was wrong. "What's up?" "What do you mean, you got to study. You're the teacher." "I'm not a teacher yet. I'm going in front of a board first to see if I am good enough to teach."
My feelings were hurt that he was not going to spend my last evening with me and the Chinese restaurant, and the girls with peach fuzz covered tan legs and hard nipples. "I thought you were not going to tell me anything because I had no 'need to know'? He just stared quizzically. "Well I don't like it here too much, I'm going back to Arlington Hall. And on my way out I'll stop by the restaurant and tell them your name is Moon Cha and you been lying just to get free meals." Then I walked out, checked out of the post, packed my duffle bag, went to the Greyhound Station and got a ticket to an Air Force Base for a MATS (Military Air Transport) flight.
It was September
1st. I had to report on/or about the fourth. I was
home in two days. The next morning, it was crisp, I was on
the porch looking down the
"Hi Uncle Joe."
"What are you doing here. You just joined the Army. Every time I turn around, you're home again. You just came home for your Grandpa's funeral and now you're home again. Did you go AWOL?"
I ignored that. "Do you know why the geese fly in a V instead of one behind the other?
"It's easier going or they wouldn't do it."
"Why", I queried.
"I don't know why, I'm no goose. Your whole life you been going around asking, why, every time someone says something".
"Well I know why on this one, I just wanted to know if others commonly knew it. It's because they are in the slip stream of the one in front and the slip stream pushes them along just like the surf pushes a surfer along. That saves them a lot of gas." "Well if that's so then why didn't the pilots fly to their target in a geese formation to save gas? God knows they needed to save gas." "It's because the pilot can't stay in the right place of the slip stream. The surfer, she has to constantly be adjusting and a goose can do that to." "Why you been saying 'she', you been out surfing with some shes?" "For the same reason you been saying goose instead of gander." I said as I started singing,
"Rooster's crowing on
Hi de um de doodel o day.
So many pretty girls, you can't count them,
All the remi necon dinecen day.
Old Gray Goose went down the river,
Hi de um de doodel o day.
If I'd a been a gander, I'da gone with her,
All the remi necon dinecen day.
Old man Newman can I have your daughter
Hi de um de doodel o day.
To bake my bread and fetch my water.
All the remi necon dinecen day.
No Sir young Sir you can't have her.
Hi de um de doodel o day.
She won't work and do what she oughter.
All the remi necon dinecen day.
I couldn't tell him anything about
Two days to get
to
I was right back in the same bunk at Arlington Hall. First thing I did was to sew on one set of Sergeant stripes. Next weekend I could hitchhike to Grafton and let my mum sew the rest on (I should write sew on the rest--no preposition at the end of the sentence. My English teacher in college told me that when editors tried to de-Anglo-Saxonize Winston Churchill's prepositions at the end of a sentence, he said, "That is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.") The next thing I did was to report to Neil Ganzert, my civilian boss. At the gate of the big old brick building where General Rikelforfer and his staff were, the MP said, "Your badge isn't for this building, Sergeant?" It felt good someone calling me sergeant. "I just checked in last night, I have to pick up my permanent badge today. I want to see Mr. Ganzert on the General's Staff." "Not without a badge." He picked up the phone, glanced in the phone book and dialed, "There is a Sergeant McAvoy at the gate to see you, sir. I can't, he has no badge. Mr. Ganzert will be right out," he said to me. I started pacing. Each pace was farther away in my concentration about what had gone on there before I had left.
"Where are you going, Sergeant", the MP said? "No where, just pacing." "Well, please don't pace too far. Regulations say that if you call someone out of Headquarters, you cannot leave until they get here." "OK, OK."
"Hi
Niel." "Hi", we shake hands. "I see
you're a sergeant now, how did that happen?" He had a
sparkle in his eye, I knew he had something to do with it. "I
hear you been all over the country. Out on the beach.
Did you like the palm trees?" "Loved them, and
the girls, and the beach, and the whole scene." "Let's
take a little walk", as he headed out. "Why
didn't you tell me you had orders? "Well, there is the
'need to know' thing so I didn't know whether I was supposed to
or not. Besides, I thought the General's staff got all the
info", I lied. "Your RTOP (research and
technology operating plan) went through." What he was
talking about was the work I did during the time I was first at
Arlington Hall The Army, Navy, and Air Force were in
the process of combining the Army Security Agency, the Navel
Security Service, and the Air Force Security Service and civilian
agencies who did ELINT (electronics intelligence) into the brand
new National Security Agency, NSA. In 1953 NSA began their move
from Arlington Hall into their new home at Fort Meade MD. They
would oversee all communications intelligence for the
"Getting you back here was a mess. First we had to find you. The Adjacent's office got your assignment from the Fort Devon Testing Officer. Then the Adjacent wanted to know why I wanted you, a recent recruit. I had to explain that you helped write the RTOP and were needed to carry out the study."
"That's what
I have to do? I have to give up
"No, you
could go to
I settled into
the barracks. In the barracks at Arlington Hall Station,
the cryptographers, linguist, and experts of the enlisted ranks,
mostly draftees and three year regular army, lived in
the upstairs of the barracks. They had arranged wall units
in ways that make private rooms while the cooks and motor pool
personal lived downstairs with rows of bunks. I think the
more resourceful soldiers upstairs went to the wood working hobby
shop on post and made the petitions with wardrobes and chest of
draws. The barracks houses all had the same pattern.
There was a cast system. There was a large MP contingency
because veryone other than permanent employees had an MP escort
at all time. They had their own quarters. Another
unique thing was that the upstairs soldiers, a tight knit bunch
went together and rented a large suite just off post on Columbia
Pike. It was walking distance. It was not so much for
their use but usually there would be some friends coming into
We will come back to this situation later. Up stairs were
young men of very diverse backgrounds. Remember, except for
basic training I had never been out of
In the barracks we shared the bathrooms and showers with the cooks. Many were amazed and curious about the cooks. That was their first time to have the opportunity to be around working class people. All young people were included in the draft. They must have sent only those that tested low to the cooks school. I am ashamed now that I used to manipulate the cooks to get them to talk about the kikes, niggers, wops, hunkies, dagos, spicks, and polock's. For example, when I was alone with the cooks I would rant and rave and teach them that Franklin Roosevelt was the culprit that gave women suffrage. Then, when the up stairs gang was around, I would get them to tell how F.D.R. was the perpetrator of women winning suffrage. It looked like innocent fun then and saw these people as innocuous. Little could I have imagined that in 40 years one wing of the conservative right (and yes CEO's-to-be from the quaza-AWAL-repo-depo and upstairs gangs) would hook up with these hate mongers to champion George W. Bush.
I put my issued kit in the foot locker and locked it, to be opened only if there was an inspection, all except two wool o.d. uniforms (Ike jacket types) that I kept on hangers. From the PX I bought 12 white dress shirts; five khaki pants; 5 khaki short pants; two two-piece sets of wool long underwear; five pairs of heavy wool o.d. socks; cotton underwear and light socks and a Sheaffer white-dot-Balance, 14 K gold fine point nib, fountain pen, and a 6 inch long "toad sticker" pocket knife that weighed 5 ounces (the weight of a baseball, I could stick it into the side of a hay bale at baseball pitching distances). From a clothing store I bought a light weight navy blue blazer; one light and one heavy wool sweater; a heavy Harris Tweed wool sports coat; a pair of brown loafers; a pair of white tennis shoes; a few white handkerchiefs; a brown fedora hat; and five white cotton (two inch brim all around) tennis hats.
The only other worldly possession I had was a
No other worldly possessions did I want or need. Khaki
short or long pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up
were perfect summer clothes for casual or sport ware. For
cooler weather I had a light wool sweater (I also has a
nice wool o.d. issued sweater). Colder weather, I had two
sets of longjohns and a heavy sweater and tweed jacket if need
be. For more formal ware, I had white shirts, tie and
blazer or tweed jacket. For even more formal ware, a
uniform is always appropriate, a tux could always be rented.
My wardrobe was designed around the Fort Meyer Quartermaster
laundry service.
I ate free in the
mess hall, ink for my pen was at the Post Office, the orderly
room, or at my desk at work. Never before or since have I
had such a worry free logistic arrangement to take care of my
personal needs. One might think this preoccupation implies
obsession with an organized life, just the opposite is true.
If they had invented Attention Deficit Disorder, I would have
been the original member of the disorder. I leave things
around and forget where I put things. I had to be a world
traveler on this job. I was off to
I did nicely, as would the kids today with ADD, if the parents cared enough about them not to require them to stay in a structured mold of parental convenience and if the parents quit listening to TV advertisement for hours every day. The parents of ADD children have SCD, stupid conformance disorder. Stupid because the idea that the children will miss out on academics if their ass is not tied to a chair all day. Stupid because the SCD parents march to the tune of the drug corporation drummer. I missed out on formal learning when growing up but I have read all the classics and mastered all the sciences. If an ADD child is bright (usually the case) they will learn while not in a barbaric arrangement of sitting in a classroom all day with structured sedentary activities and being zombie by medication and labeled with a disorder. If an ADD child is slow (uncommon) they have no business sitting in a classroom all day.
Because of my ADD, I have been distracted, where was I?
My pen, my
watch, my orders, and a simple kit of civilian and military
clothes minimized discombobulating. I unconsciously
combated my absent mindedness. I did not at the time know I
was absent minded, or had ADD. But I could keep things
straight if I had to. I learned, I realize now, little
tricks. Fifty years hence, and I still wake up from a dream
in a cold sweat. I dream that I am eating breakfast in a
dinner at the counter with a locked briefcase clutched between my
feet. The next thing I know, in my dream, is that I am
walking down the street and forgot the briefcases! It was
an exciting life, full of culture shock. A 22 year old
young man who never knew a stranger and who had ridden in a car
only two times in his life; traveled all over the world by
himself. In the winter of 1953 I bought a car and a State
Policeman friend in
Chapter 4
Asymmetric
Codes (RSA Coming of Age)
From its beginning with telegraphy in the War Between the States, as Southerners say, crypto was the sole purview of the government until 1976. After the World War II until 1970 there was a steady increase in the need for secret communications in the private sector. This was fueled by international banking, McCarthyism, popular resistance to the Vietnam War, the advent of computers as communications devices, and a general concern with First Amendment rights. Consequently crypto was increasingly being studied as a specialty in the Mathematics Departments of Universities. Yet the NSA publicly, openly, and emphatically alleged that no private citizen had the right to send encrypted messages to another if the cipher was too strong for the government to break.
During the Cold War in 1959, one of the
concerns of the military was that an attack on the
In the Beginning, ARPA created the ARPANET.
And the ARPANET was without form and void.
And darkness was upon the deep.
And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, 'Let there be a protocol,' and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, 'Let there be more protocols,' and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, 'Let there be more networks,'
and it was so."
Danny Cohan, 1962
For example, the
authors of The ARPA Completion Report (1978) wrote:
"Concurring about the importance of the development of
e-mail, The largest single surprise of the ARPANET program has
been the incredible popularity and success of network mail. There
is little doubt that the techniques of network mail developed in
connection with the ARPANET program are going to sweep the
country and drastically change the techniques used for
intercommunication in the public and private sectors." No
one could ever have imagined at the completion of the ARPANET in
1977 that this very arrangement for coping with communication
recovery after partial destruction under military attack, would
end up as a sprawling, uncontrolled, uncontrollable, and even
indefinable communication entity the is now most of world wide
commerce and communication--the internet. Most every
village in the world is connected by optical fiber to every other
village in the world for quick, low cost, high data rate
connection.
In all the scenarios of cryptography in Chapter 3 messages were from a specific person to a specific person (or station). Each of the participants had to have a copy of the same code book that instructed the encryption. Decryption was done in exactly the reverse process. In another famous example of WWII, this was done using the Enigma machine by the Germans. But like code books, the exact Enigma machine has to be used on both ends of the transmit/receive messages. This is why it is called a symmetric cipher. To understand why NSA or anyone else cannot decipher encrypted messages any more and why public key crypto has resulted in the flourishing of internet business, we first have to understand the RSA encryption algorithm.
The
story begins with Marty Hellman. Born in 1945, his
father taught physics in the
Why had Diffie's once-intermittent interest become such a
consuming passion? Behind every great cryptographer, it
seems, there is a driving pathology. Though Diffie's quest
was basically an intellectual challenge, he had come to take it
very personally. Beneath his casual attire and streaming
blond hair, Diffie was a proud and determined man. He had
an unusual drive for getting at what he considered the bedrock
truth of any issue. This lead to the fascination with
protecting and uncovering secrets, especially important secrets
that were desperately held. "Ostensibly, my reason for
getting interested in this was its importance to personal
privacy," he now says. "But I was also fascinated
with investigating this business that people wouldn't tell you
about" It was as if solving this conundrum would
provide a more general meaning to the world at large. "I
guess in a very real sense I'm a Gnostic," he said, "I
had been looking all my life for some great mystery . . . I think
somewhere deep in my mind is the notion that if I could learn
just the right thing, I would be saved".
And then, Diffie's quest to discover truths in cryptography
became intertwined with another sort of romance: His
courtship of Mary Fischer. It has not been Whit Diffie's
original intention to fall in love with a Jewish Brooklyn-born
animal trainer who was already married. Up to the day when
she upbraided him on the phone for ignoring her, he had in fact
hardly thought of her. But her outburst struck a nerve,
perhaps more so because his won longtime relationship was on the
wane. When he bid goodbye to Mary on his way across the
country, and told her he'd see her in a year, he meant it. With
about $12,000 he had saved from his salary at Mitre and an
intention to live "low on the hog," as he later put it,
he was out to learn all he could about crypto--and maybe do
something about it. That deemed like a solitary mission.
But in August 1973, when he stopped by Fischer's New Jersey house
for a visit, he found that her marriage was falling apart and
that she was finding relief by going to charismatic prayer
meetings. It was not the type of thing she felt comfortable
talking about to mathematical types like Diffie, but when she
came out with it, his reaction took her aback. "You
know, Mary," he said, "I've always had a soft spot for
mystics." They began to spend time together. Fischer
didn't drive, and Diffie fell into the habit of escorting her to
zoos--especially to locate a King cobra--and then on longer trips
to view architecturally interesting churches. At one point,
on a
When Diffie and Mary next drove which ever 510 (Dotson)
was running at that time to the West Coast for a stint of
house-setting for John McCarthy, one of the first things that
Diffie did was phone this young professor of electrical
engineering. "I arranged a half-hour meeting at my
office at Stanford," Marty Hellman now recalls,
"figuring it's just not going to go anywhere, but what the
heck." Thus was made the match that, in the world of
crypto, would later attain the resonance of famous pairings
elsewhere: Woodward-Bernstein, Lennon-McCartney, Watson-Crick.
Diffie-Hellman. . . .
The half-hour meeting went on for an hour, two hours, longer.
Hellman simply didn't want it to end, and Diffie, too, seemed
eager to continue for as long as possible. Hellman had
promised his wife he'd be home by late afternoon to watch their
two small children while she went off, so finally he asked Diffie
back to his house. No problem! Diffie called Mary and
she came over to have dinner with Whit and all the Hellmans, and
it wasn't until
Both Diffie and Hellman firmly believed that the advent of
digital communications made commercial cryptography absolutely
essential. All of these huge computer and telephone
networks made life incredible easy for eavesdroppers--it was
going to be possible to fully automate spying. At least
with radio broadcasts, snoopers had to monitor numerous points in
the channel band; with a network it was as if everyone were
broadcasting on the same channel. A spy agency like the NSA
could--and would--simply turn on the
After
a year's work together, the below article made them famous.
Not immediately. In fact the reaction by the old-boy
network was, "Who in the hell do these whippersnappers think
they are. Anyone who knows anything about cryptography,
knows that the most sacred and time proven thing about crypto is,
you have to keep your keys secret! That is what
General Grant painfully learned in the Civil War when he was
admonished by the Secretary of War. That is what the
Germans painfully learned in World War II with their enigma
machine. These snott-nosed academic types did not know that
key information killed people! Diffei and Hellmen
knew. It was just that in 1976 the time was ripe for people
in non-government domains to use crypto. But really,
everyone just laughed it off. After all there was no way in
hell to come up with a scheme for a public key cryptosystem!
New Directions in
Cryptography
W. Diffie and M. E. Hellman, IEEE Transactions on Information
Theory, vol. IT-22, Nov. 1976, pp: 644-654.
Abstract
Two
kinds of contemporary developments in cryptography are examined.
Widening applications of teleprocessing have given rise to a need
for new types of cryptographic systems, which minimize the need
for secure key distribution channels and supply the equivalent of
a written signature. This paper suggests ways to solve these
currently open problems. It also discusses how the theories
of communication and computation are beginning to provide the
tools to solve cryptographic problems of long standing.
1
INTRODUCTION
We
stand today on the brink of a revolution in cryptography. The
development of cheap digital hardware has freed it from the
design limitations of mechanical computing and brought the cost
of high grade cryptographic devices down to where they can be
used in such commercial applications as remote cash dispensers
and computer terminals. In turn, such applications create a need
for new types of cryptographic systems which minimize the
necessity of secure key distribution channels and supply the
equivalent of a written signature. At the same time,
theoretical developments in information theory and computer
science show promise of providing provable secure cryptosystems,
changing this ancient art into a science. . . .
The
best known cryptographic problem is that of privacy: Preventing
the unauthorized extraction of information from communications
over an insecure channel in order to use cryptography to insure
privacy, however, it is currently necessary for the communicating
parties to share a key which is known to no one else. This
is done by sending the key in advance over some secure channel
such as a private courier or registered mail. A private
conversation between two people with no prior acquaintance is a
common occurrence in business, however, and it is unrealistic to
expect initial business contacts to be postponed long enough for
keys to be transmitted by some physical means. The cost and
delay imposed by this key distribution problem is a major barrier
to the transfer of business communications through large
teleprocessing networks.
Section
III proposes two approaches to transmitting keying information
over public (i.e., insecure) channels without compromising the
security of the system. In a public key cryptosystem enciphering
and deciphering are governed by distinct keys, E and D,
such that computing D from E is computationally
infeasible (e.g. requiring 10100 instructions). The
enciphering key E can thus be publicly disclosed without
compromising the deciphering key D. Each user of the
network can, therefore, place his enciphering key in a public
directory. This enables any user of the system to send a
message to any other user enciphered in such a way that only the
intended receiver is able to decipher it. A private
conversation can therefore be held between any two individuals
regardless of whether they have ever communicated before. Each
one sends messages to the other enciphered in the receiver's
public enciphering key and deciphers the message he receives
using his won secret deciphering key. We propose some techniques
for developing public key cryptosystems, but the Problem is
still largely open (emphasis mine, not the journal).
I repeat, the reaction by the old-boy network was, "Who in the hell do these whippersnappers think they are. Anyone who knows anything about cryptography, knows that the most sacred and time proven thing about crypto is, you have to keep your keys secret! That is what General Grant painfully learned in the Civil War when he was reprimanded by the Secretary of War. That is what the Germans painfully learned in World War II with their enigma machine. That is what turned the tide at the Battle of Midway in the Pacific. These snott-nosed academic types did not know that key information killed people! Diffie and Hellmen knew. It was just that in 1976 the time was ripe for people in non-government domains to use crypto. But really, everyone just laughed it off. After all there was no way in hell to come up with a scheme for a public key cryptosystem! When I scanned the IEEE Transactions and saw this article, it was difficult for me to read it. I had to put it down and read it because my hands were trembling so. Probable, I know now, from post traumatic stress syndrome.
Imagine how exciting it was when just a year
later "the problem that was still largely open" was
open no more. A method of finding the D and E spoken
of above was simple, beautiful, functional: has now been used
successfully by governments, military, and business world wide
for 35 years; has the only software (PGP) that comes with
complete instructions (source code) so that you can guarantee
there is no trap door; has never been compromised; has, as
Diffie and Hellman perdicted, resulted in a commerce and business
paradigm, called the Internet, that will change the world in
unimaginable ways in the 21st century. It was
published in 1978 by Rivest, R.; A. Shamir; L. Adleman,
"A
Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key
Cryptosystems".
Communications of the ACM 21
(2): pp.120–126. It is know as the RSA
encryption system after the inventers. Ron
Rivest, Adi
Shamir, and Leonard Adleman will go
down in history along with other great scientific intivaters such
as Clark Maxwell, Isic Newton, and Albert Einstein. Phil
Zimmerman, the author and distributer of the freeware, PGP;
will go down in history as a folk hero like Patric Henry, Robin
Hood, and Winstin Chirchhill. These days, unlike it was
before all this happened, if you want to find out about any of
this, you can just 'google' these guys (or me) to your heart's
content, thanks to them you can 'google' them.
The story is better than any fiction. It is a twenty year saga of the might and oppression of the whole US Government in the embodiment of the National Security Agency; against a free citizen, Phil Zimmerman, who posted his public key crypto software, PGP, on the computer freeware bulletin boards. He posted it in anticipation of NSA declaring it a "state secret." He gave up all revenues that he would have gotten for his work. As a result he was under indictment by the federal government for three years. An extensive legal battle was enjoined; NSA against computer-freedom advocates, and the American Civil Liberties Union. It ended by the announcement to wit,
Date:
From: "Philip L. Dubois"
Subject: News Release
"Yesterday
morning, I received word from Assistant
Keane's letter to me:"
"The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California has decided that your client, Philip Zimmermann, will not be prosecuted in connection with the posting to USENET in June 1991 of the encryption program Pretty Good Privacy. The investigation is closed."
The
"Michael
J. Yamaguchi, United States Attorney for the Northern District of
California, announced today that his office has declined
prosecution of any individuals in connection with the posting to
USENET in June 1991 of the encryption program known as
"Pretty Good Privacy." The investigation has been
closed. No further comment will be made by the
Assistant
On receiving this news, Mr. Zimmermann posted this to the Cypherpunks
list:
"My lead
defense lawyer, Phil Dubois, received a fax this morning from the
Assistant
This brings to a close a criminal investigation that has spanned the last three years. I'd like to thank all the people who helped us in this case, especially all the donors to my legal defense fund. Apparently, the money was well-spent. And I'd like to thank my very capable defense team: Phil Dubois, Ken Bass, Eben Moglen, Curt Karnow, Tom Nolan, and Bob Corn-Revere. Most of the time they spent on the case was pro-bono. I'd also like to thank Joe Burton, counsel for the co-defendant.
There are many others I can thank, but I don't have the presence of mind to list them all here at this moment. The medium of email cannot express how I feel about this turn of events."
Philip Zimmermann
Phil Dubois later that day wrote:
I'd like to add a few words to those of my client. First, I thank Mr. Keane for his professionalism in notifying us of the government's decision. It has become common practice for federal prosecutors to refuse to tell targets of investigations that the government has decided not to prosecute. I appreciate Mr. Keane's courtesy.
Let me add my thanks to the other members of the defense team-- Ken Bass in Washington D.C. (kbass@venable.com), Curt Karnow in San Francisco (karnow@cup.portal.com), Eben Moglen in New York (em21@columbia.edu), and Tom Nolan in Palo Alto (74242.2723@compuserve.com). Bob Corn-Revere in
D.C. (rcr@dc1.hhlaw.com) was a great help on First Amendment issues. These lawyers are heroes. They donated hundreds of hours of time to this cause. Each is outstanding in his field and made a contribution that nobody else could have made. It has been an honor and a privilege to work with these gentlemen.
Mr. Zimmermann
mentioned a lawyer named Joe Burton (joebur@aol.com) of
exemplifies the finest traditions of the Bar and the highest standard of integrity. I am proud to know Joe Burton.
The warriors at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)-- Marc Rotenberg, David Sobel, and David Banisar-- and at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) provided financial, legal, and moral support and kept the public informed. They continue to do so, and we all owe them thanks for it.
Those members of the press who recognized the importance of this story and told the world about it should be commended. Undeterred by the absence of sex and violence, these reporters discussed the real issues and in so doing served the public well.
Many other
people, lawyers and humans alike, made invaluable contributions.
My assistants Alicia Alpenfels, Suzanne Turnbull Paulman, and
Denise Douglas and my investigator Eli Nixon kept us organized.
Rich Mintz, Tom Feegel, and Nathaniel Borenstein of First Virtual
put up a Web site and aggressively supported the Zimmermann Legal
Defense Fund. Another site was built by Michael Sattler of
Finally, I offer my thanks to everyone who contributed to the Zimmermann Legal Defense Fund. People all over the world gave their hard-earned money to support not only Phil Zimmermann's defense but also the cause of privacy. It is impossible to be too pessimistic about our future when there are so many of you.
Now, some
words about the case and the future. Nobody should conclude
that it is now legal to export cryptographic software. It
isn't. The law may change, but for now, you'll probably be
prosecuted if you break it. People wonder why the
government declined prosecution, especially since the government
isn't saying. One perfectly good reason might be that Mr.
Zimmermann did not break the law. (This is not always a
deterrent to indictment. Sometimes the government isn't
sure whether someone's conduct is illegal and so prosecutes that
person to find out.) Another might be that the government
did not want to risk a judicial finding that posting
cryptographic software on a site in the
There are
forces at work that will, if unresisted, take from us our
liberties. There always will be. But at least in the
Phil Zimmerman did not export PGP to other countries. He put it on the "bulletin board". One of the new concepts that the prosecution would have to face in a Phil Zimmerman trial was, what constitutes exporting? As they say, on the internet, national boundaries are just speed bumps.
RSA Examples
Let's first take the algorithm in its simplest form. Any one or any company that wants to receive encrypted messages has their public key published on the internet at a key server site, such as <www.keyserver.net> . This is a key server that gives the public key for the PGP encryption software program. Lets suppose you want to send a secure message to my company, for example, your order for a chocolate pig with lipstick. For simplicity we will also assume that email messages are out there for all to intercept. Your credit card number is in your order message. You can look up the public key for the Chocolate Pig Factory and email the order. Of course you do not have to look up the public key on <www.keyserver.net> if you download the Chocolate Pig Factory web page, the number is embedded in their software for ordering. The public key for the company is the numbers 1271 and 7. So when you want to order a chocolate pig with lipstick for $19.95 including postage, just send in your credit card number 3521 2576 0623 1844. Let's show the encryption of the first two digits, 35, of your credit card number. The RSA algorithm goes like this,
.
To get 791, go to the desktop of your PC or
laptop computer and bring down the calculator. Enter 35 and
then click on the 
tab, which means x to the y
power. Then enter 7 and click on the = tab. Read
64339296875 as the answer. Then click on the 
tab and enter 1271 and read 791.
791 is sent as the encrypted 35. What this means in plane
arithmetic is that you have divided 64339296875 by 1271 long
division and gotten a remainder of 791.
In other words 
So means that 791 is the
remainder when dividing 1271 into 35 multiplied by itself seven
times. When you send out 791 for the first two digits
of your credit card number, there is no way an interceptor can
trace 791 back to 35 because there are a zillion numbers when
divided by 1271 will give a remainder of 791. But I can at
the Chocolate Pig Factory. That makes it just as safe for
you as if you came to the Chocolate Pig Factory and gave me your
credit card number or 'swiped' it in my credit card machine.
How do I "go backwards" ,i.e., decipher 791 back
into 35 at the Chocolate Pig Factory? The Chocolate Pig
Factory's computer is the only one that knows the secret key, my
private key, 343. With this secret number I can go
backwards, watch,
.
Try it on your computer calculator, just as
you did the encryption. Go to the desktop of your PC or
laptop computer and bring down the calculator. Enter 791
and then click on the tap, which means x to the y
power. Then enter 343 and click on the = tab. Read
1.1872272047538132424325349208222e+994 as the answer. Then
click on the tab and enter 1271 and read 35.
I'll do that at the Chocolate Pig Factory and use 35 as the first
two digits of your credit card number. Why is this safe?
Why is it that I, at the Chocolate Pig Factory know the secret
number 343 and no one else in the world does? Because I
generated it from the RSA algorythm. It goes like
this. First I chose three prime numbers. A prime is a
number that cannot be evenly divided by another number. I
chose, (or rather my computer chooses) 31 and 41, and 7. I
multiplied 31x41=1271 and sent this and 7 out to the rest of the
world as my public key. These two numbers will be used by
anyone who wants to send a private message to me, as our example
above shows. This is how I establish my privete key (343).
The algorithm goes like this: Subtract 1 from each
of the two original prime numbers 31 and 41. Then plug them
in the equation,
.
k has to be a whole number. There
is a procedure for getting the lowest value of k that is
explained in Appendix A. For this simple case, 
. Try it. 7 x 343 = 2(1200) +
1. 30 and 40 were used because they are 31-1 and 41-1.
So if the rest of the world, or anyone who wants to decipher the
message 791 and get my credit card number, all they have to know
is that my public key 1271 was the product 31 x 41 =1271, right?
That is right. So I'll use bigger prime numbers, say, my
public key is 109849382951333 and 7. Now to find my private
key, what are the two primes that were multiplied together to get
109849382951333 ? It will take your computer a few minutes
to get the two primes. They are 15426319 x 7120907 =
109849382951333. From this information one can get the
private key. But what if the public key is 7 and
188198812920607963838697239461650439807163563379417382700763356422988859715234665485319060606504743045317388011303396716199692321205734031879550656996221305168759307650257059
?. Now how long will it take your computer to find the two
primes, when multiplied together, gives you this
number? It will take months using the best and fastest
computer. But my computer at the Chocolate Pig
Factory multiplied two primes together and got this number in no
time. And so if someone wants to find the first two digits
of your credit card number (35), it will take them months of a
dedicated computer. No one will ever know what the
two primes were that the Chocolate Pig Factory used to generate
their public key. Don't spend years trying different primes
to fine out, I'll tell you. One was 398075086424064937397125500550386491199064362342526708
406385189575946388957261768583317 and the other was
472772146107435302536223071973048224632914695302097116459852171130520711256363590397527.
This is the essence of public key crypto. It takes a long time to factor two numbers that can be multiplied together in no time.
Let's use another example. Let's go back to the example of the JN 25 Japanese fleet encryption system of WW II fame only use the RSA asymmetric encryption system. For convenience, so you will not have to leaf back and forth, we will duplicate Figures 1.6 and 1.7:
Figure 1.6 Encrypted message sent from the aircraft carrier Kaga to port giving time of arrival
The additive entry is a random number taken from the 300 page book of random numbers. Note that
Figure
1.7 The message as decypted by the cypher clerk at the
port.
We now imagine that the cipher clerk on Kaga and his mate, the cipher clerk at the Japanese naval base could look into the future. They did not want His Majestie's Kaga blown up in the battle of Midway, so they reached into the future 38 years and got a copy of the August 1977 issue of Scientific American, page 120, article on the RSA encryption algorithm. Instead of using the seven random numbers from his additive book, the cipher clerk on Kaga would send: 45391, 71286, 93750, 37974, 88970, 07057, 94188 as the encrypted message. They are calculated using the RSA algorithm and the Fleet Headquarter's public keys, 100889 and 23, that everybody (even the Americans) knows:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The cipher clerk at the Fleet Headquarters would get the message and would transform it back to its plan text form using his secret key 30503:
.
.
.
.
.
.
Why could only the cipher clerk at the Fleet Headquarters transform the numbers back to their original additives? Because the cipher clerk at the Fleet Headquarters is the only one who has the secret key 30503.
Why could not everybody and his brother try numbers until they came up with the secret key 30503? Yes they could. An easier way to find 30503 would be to find out what two prime numbers when multiplied together give the public key 100889 . It does not take long to go through all primes starting with 13, 17, 23, 31, . . . . to find out that 233x433=100889. This is a lot easier than just trying numbers to get 30503. If you know that 233 x 433 = 100889 the public key, along with the other part of the public key, 23, then there is a procedure to get the secret key 30503. The procedure is called the extended Euler (pronounced oiler) algorithm and is described in Appendix A . For this particular case it is shown in Figure 2.1 how it is done.
| j | remainder | q = quotient |  |
 |
| -1 | 100224 |  |
 |
|
| 0 | 23 |  |
 |
|
| 1 | 13 | 4357 |  1-(4357)0=1 |
 0-4357x1=-4357 |
| 2 | 10 | 1 |  0-1x1=-1 |
 1-(1)(-4357)=4358 |
| 3 | 3 | 1 |  1-(-1)=2 |
 -4357-(4358)=-2(4357)-1= -8715 |
| 4 |  |
3 |  -1-3(2)=-7 = k |
 4358-3(-8715) = 30503 = d |
Figure 2.1
The private key is 30503. It is obtained from knowing that
the public key is a product of the two primes p and q such that
pq=the public key, 100889 and (p-1) (q-1)=100224. This can
only be easily obtained by knowing that p=233 and q=433.
Even with these small three digit primes you can see that it takes longer to factor 100889 into 233 x 433 than it does to multiply 233 x 433. How long would it take to factor 188198812920607963838697239461650439807163563379417382700763356422988859715234665485319060606504743045317388011303396716199692321205734031879550656996221305168759307650257059 into the product of 398075086424064937397125500550386491199064362342526708406385189575946388957261768583317 and 47277214610743530253622307197304822463291469530209711645985217113052071125636359039752? As one of the first experiments in RSA crypto system, it took a lot of computers working full time for three months to find out what the above two primes are that produced the 174 digit number n for (mod n). It took only a fraction of a second to multiply the two primes to get the quotient. The essence of public key crypto systems, such as PGP, in common use today; is that everybody knows how to decrypt a message but it takes a long, long time for everyone except the intended recipient to do it. As we pointed out in the Introduction, William Crowell, Deputy Director, National Security Agency said in 1997, "If all the personal computers in the world - 260 million - were put to work on a single PGP-encrypted message, it would still take an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe, on average, to break a single message.”
Chapter
5
Hoodwinking
Congress
There is no such
thing as the mind other than what goes on in the brain. The
active part of the brain is made up of very large nerve cells
(neurons) and their transmission lines (axons). See Figure
4.1. The vast majority of neurons are generated before
birth. Neurons are "intended" to last a lifetime.
Neurons are not mitotically active, i.e. they do not divide like
most cells in the body, so when they are cut they do not
regenerate, like bones and muscles. They are not directly
nourished by blood capillaries, hence their gray look. The
keys to the understanding of the function of a neuron lies in (1)
the shape of the neuron and, in particular, its protrusions
(processes), (2) the chemicals the neuron uses to communicate
with other neurons (neurotransmitters) and (3) the ways in which
the neuron may react to the neurotransmitters released by other
neurons. Neurons have long tentacles (processes), which
extend from the cell body (perikaryon). The processes are divided
into two functionally and morphologically different groups, dendrites
and axons. Dendrites are the "receptive
tentacles" for incoming messages in the form of electrical
pulses. Each neuron has a single axon. The axon is
the transmission line that travels beyond many adjacent neurons
to send an electoral pulse beyond the immediate area.
The
axon forms small, bulb-shaped swellings (boutons) at the ends
(terminal boutons) or along the course (boutons en passant) of
its branches. Connections (synapses) are contacts between a
bouton formed by the axon of one neuron and the cell surface of
another neuron, as shown in Figure 4.2. Synaptic
vesicles are small sacks that contain the neurotransmitter
chemicals. They accumulate close to the site of contact between
the bouton and the neuron. The release of the neurotransmitter
from the synaptic vesicles into the space between the bouton and
the neuron, allows for the transmission or stopping of a pulse to
the neuron.
Figure
4.1 Photograph of a neuron and axon.
Figure 4.2 Drawing of an
axon-dendrite synapse.
There
are several hundred functionally different areas, i.e. groups of
neurons, in the brain. Based on their location, the shape of
their dendritic tree and the course of their axon, several
thousand types of neurons can be distinguished. Each neruon
uses only one of the neurotransmitting chemicals at its synapse.
You have probably heard of some of them, especially those that
send one on a high, e.g. dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine,
noradrenaline, glycine, and gamma-amino butal acid.
I repeat, the brain is the mind. You
are born with 100 billion of these cells. From the
beginning of life electrical pulses are running around the brain
like flashing lights on a Christmas tree. All wired up
ready to provide you with basic instincts. For
example, eggs stolen and hatched from a wren that builds a very
complicated sophisticated hanging nest; are raised in isolation;
bread in isolation for many generations; then released into the
wild; they will forthwith build the same complicated
sophisticated nest. Another example, a mating pair of Bald
Eagles both bring sticks and moss and structural goodies to the
nest. No mater how or where the female eagle inlays her
bootie into the nest, when she goes for food, the male rearranges
every little stick (I have often been accused of similar
behavior).
So with these basic inborn instincts
"meaningful circuits" and vast wasteland of
"meaningless noise" pulses the brain is ready to start
knowing. At first there are smells and sounds in the form
of pulses coming in by the axons to the respective smell
and sound areas of the brain.
We'll use interchangeable the words brain circuits and pictures in the head. This is the simplest yet the profoundest thought you have ever had! How could something you look at, understand relative to its surroundings, and the thoughts you have about it, be a bunch of flashing neurons in your head? You might say, "It's really out there." Maybe it is, but the thoughts you have about it are not out there. This brings up the most important idea you need to have in order to understand people. The thoughts you have are about the categories you have stored in your head. The brain is a categorizer. The brain does not have logic circuits like a computer. with primitive animals and humans alike, the mind categorizes everything. Whether you know it or not, your dog reads the slightest of your jesters. You categorize every thing you see, smell, feel; or are told.
There are two aspects of the mind that you need to understand in order to predict the consequence of the coming onslaught of private information from everybody in the world over the internet:
1. When you think that the ideas of another are stupid, it is only because they have reached maturity with a different set of categories than you. They will, of course, have ideas about their categories that are different than your ideas about your categories.
2. The circuits in your brain and their influence on your body movement, your basic value system, and the categories into which you fit new experiences, are completed by the age of physical maturity.
These are the
basic concepts of a new field of
psychology/linguistics/philosophy called Cognitive Science.
It presents a whole different world view and one that is
necessary for us to understand what the internet will bring.
The tenets of this world view, as laid down by George Lakoff, who
has written extensively on this subject, are: From Philosophy
in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, page 19.
The Inseparability of Categories,
Concepts, and Experience
Living systems must categorize. Since we are
neural beings, our categories are formed through our embodiment
(author note, another word for brain circuits or pictures in the
head ) . What that means is that the categories we form are
part of our experiences! They are the structures that
differentiate aspects of our experience into discernible kinds.
Categorization is thus not a purely intellectual matter,
occurring after the fact of experience. Rather, the
formation and use of categories is the stuff of experience.
It is part of what our bodies and brains are constantly engaged
in. We cannot, as some meditative traditions suggest, 'get
beyond' our categories and have a purely uncategorized and
unconceptualized experience. Neural beings cannot do that.
What we call concepts are neural structures that allow us to
mentally characterize our categories and reason about them.
Human categories are typically conceptualized in more than on
way, in terms of what are called 'prototypes'. Each
prototype is a neural structure that permits us to do some sort
of inferential or imaginative task relative to a category. Typical-case
prototypes are used in drawing inferences about category members
in the absence of any special contextual information. Ideal-case
prototypes allow us to evaluate category members relative to some
conceptual standard. (To see the difference, compare the
prototypes for the ideal husband and the typical husband.) Social
stereotypes are used to make snap judgments, usually about
people. Salient exemplars (well-known examples) are used
for making probability judgments. (For a survey of kinds of
conceptual prototypes, see Women Fire and Dangerous
Things by George Lakoff, 1987) In short,
prototype reasoning constitutes a large proportion of the actual
reasoning that we do. Reasoning with prototypes is, indeed,
so common that it is inconceivable that we could function for
long without it.
Since most categories are matter of degree (e.g., tall people),
we also have graded concepts characterizing degrees along some
scale with norms of various kinds for extreme cases, normal
cases, not quite normal cases, and so on. Such graded norms
are described by what are called linguistic hedges (Hedges,
George Lakoff, J. of Phi1ophical Logic,2.1993,458-508), for
example, very, pretty, kind of, barely, and so on. For the
sake of imposing sharp distinctions, we develop what might be
called essence prototypes, which conceptualize categories as if
they were sharply defined and minimally distinguished from one
another. . . . .
In
short, we form extraordinarily rich conceptual structures for our
categories and reason about them in many ways that are crucial
for our everyday functioning. All of these conceptual
structures are, of course, neural structures in our brains.
This makes them embodied in the trivial sense that any mental
construct is realized neutrally. But there is a deeper and
more important sense in which our concepts are embodied. What
makes concepts is their inferential capacity, their ability to be
bound together in ways that yield inferences. An embodied
concept is a neural structure that is actually part of, or makes
use of, the sensorimotor system of our brains. Much of
conceptual inference is, therefore, sensorimotor inference.
The prototypes and the stories and scenarios associated with
them constitutes our everyday thinking, not reason and logic.
Now for the second aspects of the mind that you need to understand in order to predict the consequence of the coming onslaught of private information from everybody in the world over the internet. To wit, the circuits in your brain and their influence on your body movement, your basic value system, and the categories into which you fit new experiences, are completed by the age of physical maturity. His/her ability to generate the equations of quantum mechanics is the same as it was when he/she was a young adult. Replace the bold print in the last sentence with any of the following phrases and access if it makes a true statement for all the people you know.
·
pleasure of running
·
pleasure of dancing
·
inclination to take risk
·
excessiveness and compulsiveness
·
feelings about people who are different
·
political persuasion
·
ability to exclusively see things as black and white, e.g. all
peoples homosexual inclinations can be willed away
·
ability to see things as complicated and no rule always applies,
i.e. there are exceptions to all rules.
·
musical aptitude
·
inclination to nurture
We could go on
and on with this list. Most of this is obvious, but what is not
obvious is the reverse. People whose ideas are outside of
the main stream, wisely prefer home schooling and otherwise keep
their children from the (permanent) influence of outsiders.
One aspect of this that is little known is the physical aspect.
Do you know anyone who can learn a completely different language
with no accent, after maturity? Don't bet money on it.
Language, is a fine muscle control activity. As with any
fine muscle activity under pressure of time or distress, it can
only be mastered prior to the maturity of the embodied mind. We
in
To repeat from George Lakoff above, In short, we form
extraordinarily rich conceptual structures for our categories and
reason about them in many ways that are crucial for our everyday
functioning. All of these conceptual structures are, of
course, neural structures in our brains.
It will be 10, even 20, or maybe even longer before youngsters
will not have in their mind's, categories of code breakers
zeroing in on advisories of the all-powerful government. "Secrecy
is the first essential in affairs of the State. (Armannd Jean
du Plessis, Cardinal de Fichelieu, chief minister to King Louis
XIII)
Appendix A
RSA Public Key Encryption
and
Signature Verification
The algorithm was publicly described in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman at MIT; the letters RSA are the initials of their surnames.
Clifford Cocks, a British mathematician working for the UK intelligence agency GCHQ, described an equivalent system in an internal document in 1973, but given the relatively expensive computers needed to implement it at the time, it was mostly considered a curiosity and, as far as is publicly known, was never deployed. His discovery, however, was not revealed until 1997 due to its top-secret classification, and Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman devised RSA independently of Cocks' work.
MIT were granted
RSA involves a public and private key. The public key in intended to be known to everyone and is used for encrypting messages. Messages encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted using the private key. RSA is secure given sufficiently long keys and the use of up-to-date implementations.
The mathematics used in the algorithm is modular arithmetic. This is the arithmetic of remainders when dividing.
.
Modular numbers can be added, subtracted and multiplied (not divided). E.g. for adding, 123 + 456 + 789 = 1368. 1368(mod7) = 3. Also 123(mod7) = 4 and 456(mod7) = 1 and 789(mod7)=5. So 4 + 1 + 5 = 10 and 10(mod7) = 3. So modular numbers can be added. For multiplication 123 x 456 x 789 = 44253432. 44253432(mod7) = 6 because,
.
But also we could have done 123(mod7) = 4 and 456(mod7) = 1 and 789(mod7)=5 and 4 x 1 x 5 = 20 and 20(mod7) = 6, the same result we got above. On your personal computer under accessories their is a desktop calculator. If you put the view in the scientific mode, there is a 'mod' key to do this arithmetic. Enter 44253432 on your desktop calculator. The click the mod key, then 7, then the = key and read 6.
The equations of the RSA algorithm to encrypt a number M with public keys n and e is,
(A1)
or
.
The encrypted number is C (M for message and C for coded message). There will exist a private key, d. for decrypting such that,
.
(A2)
This gives us back our original decrypted number M. The private key, d, can be found and kept secret if n is chosen to be the product of two secret prime numbers, that is, p and q are kept secret by the owner of the private key and,
(A3)
How do we obtain d ? In about 1630 there was a French lawyer, Pierre Fermat (pronounced ferma) who was reported dead from the plague. He was not. There were so many dieing no one could keep count. It was as good thing; too, we owe him a lot. He was not an outstanding lawyer, he was OK but he couldn't keep his mind off his hobby. Among many other things he came up with the idea that any number, absolutely any number, M, when raised to the power, (p-1)(q-1), then divided by pq, would have the remainder of 1. In other words,
.
This is called
Fermat's Little Theorem. Up to now a lot of
Fermat's work has had practical value. But until
Equation (A1) to the d power such that,
.
(A4)
Then from equation (A2) we have
.
We can divide both sides to this by M and write pq instead of n and we have,
.
(A5)
Now compare equation (4) with Fermat's Little Theorem above ,
.
(A6)
We multiply the exponent k to make it perfectly general so we can equate the exponents,
(A7)
Note that this can also be written as,
or
(A8)
Remember that the public key is n and e. Only the owner of the private key, d, knows what p and q are. So she can find d from the help of equation A8 and the help of another great figure in mathematics, Leonard Euler (pronounced oiler). Leonard Euler, who, in about 1750 came up with the idea that if two numbers, a and b, are know, then the lowest value for the other three in,
(A9)
can be found for whole numbers. Let's
take the example a=12345678 and b=45629, just
randomly picked numbers. We want to find 
; that is, we want to find 
. The algorithm was
developed by D.E. Knuth, author of the famous book, The Art of
Computer Programing,1981; as described in The Mathematics
of Ciphers, 1999,S.C. Coutinho,ISBN 1-56881-082-2. )
We start
with,
.
For our example 12345678=45629(270) + 25848.
We put subscripts on the quotient and remainder because we are
going to write b in the same form as 
. In our example it is 45629
= 25848(1) +19781. We continue this as 
as shown in column one and two of
Table A1 In order to work out an iterative arrangement, we
have to rearrange the above equation to,
. (A10)
Then substitute the remainder in terms of ,
(A11)
and we get,
.
(A12)
Equation (A11) is used in Table (A1) and
simplified in Table (A2) for our example. Notice that the
bracketed terms of equation (A11) become 
and 
becomes 
for the last term of the series. 
and
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1 | 0 |
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0 | 1 |
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Table 1A Example of Euler's
extended algorithm as described in The Mathematics of
Ciphers, 1999,S.C. Coutinho,ISBN 1-56881-082-2
| remainder | quotients |  |
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 =-18,396 |
ß=4977341 |
Table A2 A simplified version of Table A1
Of course 12345678 and 45629 are just
arbitrary numbers to show the general principle. Let's take
the RSA example from Chapter 4, Asymmetric Codes
(RSA Coming of Age), page 39 and apply the Euler Extended
Algorithm. We had p=233, q = 433, the public keys e = 23
and n = 1008889. This provided a (p-1)(q-1) of
100224. We want to find d in the formula,
. Using the procedure
described above we have,
| j | remainder | q = quotient | |
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| -1 | 100224 | |
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| 0 | 23 | |
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| 1 | 13 | 4357 | 1-(4357)0=1 |
0-4357x1=-4357 |
| 2 | 10 | 1 |
