[107548] in Cypherpunks
Granddaddies of Hackers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Sat Jan 16 12:34:24 1999
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 09:11:59 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: nobody@shinobi.alias.net (Anonymous)
Reply-To: nobody@shinobi.alias.net (Anonymous)
The New York Times, January 16, 1999
THINK TANK
The Granddaddies of All Hackers
*Last month the United States and 32 other countries
agreed to create new international controls on the
export of data-scrambling hardware and software.
Many nations fear that the most advanced scrambling,
which makes it impossible for anyone without the key
to decode the data, could thwart efforts by
intelligence agencies to track terrorists. Though
the issue is a product of the information age,
battles over secret coding have far older
precedents. Below are excerpts from "The Victorian
Internet" (Walker & Company, 1998), by Tom Standage,
in which he writes about what he calls the
"19th-century precursor" to the Internet: the
electric telegraph invented by Samuel Morse and
Charles Wheatstone.*
Cryptography -- tinkering with codes and ciphers --
was a common hobby among Victorian gentlemen.
Wheatstone and his friend Charles Babbage, who is
best known for his failed attempts to build a
mechanical computer, were both keen crackers of
codes and ciphers -- Victorian hackers, in effect.
"Deciphering is, in my opinion, one of the most
fascinating of arts," Babbage wrote in his
autobiography, "and I fear I have wasted upon it
more time than it deserves."
He and Wheatstone enjoyed unscrambling messages that
appeared in code in newspaper classified
advertisements -- a popular way for young lovers to
communicate, since a newspaper could be brought into
a house without arousing suspicion, unlike a letter
or a telegram. On one occasion Wheatstone cracked
the cipher, or letter substitution code, used by an
Oxford student to communicate with his beloved in
London. When the student inserted a message
suggesting to the young woman that they run away
together, Wheatstone inserted a message of his own,
also in cipher, advising her against it. The young
woman inserted a desperate, final message: "DEAR
CHARLIE: WRITE NO MORE. OUR CIPHER IS DISCOVERED!"
And there was certainly a demand for codes and
ciphers; telegrams were generally, though unfairly,
regarded as less secure than letters. ... The
obvious solution was to use a code.
Meanwhile, the rules determining when codes could
and could not be used were becoming increasingly
complicated as national networks, often with
different sets of rules, were interconnected. ...
Finally, in 1864, the French Government decided it
was time to sort out the regulatory mess. The major
countries of Europe were invited to a conference in
Paris to agree on a set of rules for international
telegraphy. Twenty states sent delegates, and in
1865 the International Telegraph Union was born. The
rules banning the use of codes by anyone other than
government were scrapped; at last, people could
legally send telegrams in code.
In the United States, where the telegraph network
was controlled by private companies rather than
governments, there were no rules banning the use of
codes, so they were adopted much earlier. In fact,
the first known public codes for the electric
telegraph date back to 1845, when two code books
were published to provide businesses with a means of
communicating secretly using the new technology.
Of course, such codes weren't all that secret
because the code books were widely available to
everyone (though in some cases they could be
customized). But before long another advantage of
using such nonsecret codes, known as "commercial"
codes, soon became clear -- to save money. By using
a code that replaced several words with a single
word, telegrams cost less to send.
By 1875, the use of commercial codes was starting to
get out of hand. Some codes involved weird words,
like "CHINESISKSLUTNINGSDON."
Every move the telegraph companies made to try to
reduce the use of codes was neutralized by the
increasing cunning of code compilers.
However, by this stage the drawbacks of such codes
were becoming apparent to their users as well as the
telegraph companies. Each code word meant so much
that a single misplaced letter (or dot or dash) in
transmission could dramatically change the meaning
of a message.
One particularly graphic example occurred in June
1887, when Frank J. Primrose, a wood dealer in
Philadelphia, sent William B. Toland to Kansas to
act as his agent and buy wool on his behalf. Using a
widely available off-the-shelf commercial code, the
two men passed several messages back and forth as
they kept each other informed of their transactions.
But things went horribly wrong when Primrose sent a
message explaining that he had bought 500,000 pounds
of wool. The words "I HAVE BOUGHT" were encoded by
the word "BAY" in the commercial code, and the
amount 500,000 pounds by the word "QUO," so that "I
HAVE BOUGHT ALL KINDS, 500,000 POUNDS" became "BAY
ALL KIND QUO."
This message was incorrectly transmitted to Toland
as "BUY ALL KINDS QUO," possibly because the Morse
code for "A" (dot dash) differs by only one dot from
the Morse code for "U" (dot dot dash). As a result,
Toland ... duly started to buy half a million pounds
of wool. By the time the mistake had been uncovered,
the market had turned and Primrose ended up losing
$20,000. He tried to sue Western Union, the
telegraph company that had transmitted the fateful
message, but he lost because he had failed to ask
for the message to be verified -- an optional
service that would have cost him a few cents extra.
Eventually, after a lengthy legal battle, the
Supreme Court ruled that he was entitled to a refund
only on the cost of sending the original telegram,
or just $1.15.
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