What breaks my heart about this "cold war" becoming a "hot war" is it will probably stifle school age curriculum. If its a hot button political issue then teachers won't be encouraging little johnny and suzie to show the class their nifty secret code they made on the playground. We'll hear a lot of bloviating on how every child should learn to code, but if you point out the creative minds of children are fertile ground for exploring steganography you'll get a resounding laugh and a joke about stegasaurus.

> show the class their nifty secret code

Everybody knows nifty secret codes are the gateway hobby to harder technologies like assembling electronic clocks.

Or worse, Navajo indian sympathizers.

> If its a hot button political issue then teachers won't be encouraging little johnny and suzie to show the class their nifty secret code they made on the playground

Since when does this ever happen.

Do you have kids in school? The curriculum is 70% studying for standardized tests and anything else they're lucky enough to get is 20 year old pretty shitty stuff. Go read little house on the prairie again. I bet its in your second or third grade class library. Go read about the "stinky natives" and how they were justified in taking land from the native's reservation. You think they have time to talk about racism in the great plains in their "pioneer" curriculum?

Now ask yourself is Mrs. Clarkson is gonna bother talking about anything relevant in math.

My colloquial use of "little johnny and suzie creamcheese" was meant to evoke the 1950's and dated ideas about education. But in the 30% time teachers actually get to use to educate they do still try to bring in outside materials. Emphatically! NOT controversial materials.

To me "playground" above implied elementary school. Is that really the time/place to be rocking kids' worlds with divisive controversies?

The better question is - when did they actually have control of it? They sort-of did - it took government money to put an Enigma together, but government money is only a necessary condition because it's money.

This article, this headline, is an excellent example of the BBC's bias.

How did governments lose control of mathematics?

Yes, it sounds absurd, doesn't it? The BBC have an opportunity, some would say an obligation, to educate here.

Never thought I'd see Phil Zimmerman and PGP written out of the history books of the crypto wars but there you go.

I'd say PGP got us to the point where endpoint security matters, and Apple closed the loop. Allegedly that's why they want the phone so badly: to dump data from encrypted messaging apps.

The FBI long ago adapted to breaking open general purpose computers that were encrypted by i.e. keeping them awake and logged in through arrest and seizure. PGP won't do you any good there.

Apple finally built the walls around the garden high enough (by doing security at the hardware level) that they put up a fight even when the device is on and ready to use.

They never did. Any other questions there champ?

They never had control or they never lost it?

Crypto is math. Nobody can monopolize math.

edit:

On the subject of trying to keep powerful and/or dangerous knowledge locked away from the general public, one of my older HN comments[1] was about the larger, long-term problem our species' rapid access to new knowledge and powerful technology.

We need to figure out how to safely integrate new technologies into society asap.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033

it is like any scientific knowledge - ultimately it can't be monopolized/stopped, yet a lot of people can be burned at the stake in the process. It isn't just about Middle Ages - just 60 years ago cybernetics and genetic biology were "false sciences" (with people lives destroyed in various ways [1]) in a nuclear superpower who sent the first satellite&human into space just few years later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism : "More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were sent to prison or fired or executed as a part of this campaign instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents."

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov... : "Law of large numbers or the idea of random deviation were decreed as "false theories". Statistical journals and university departments were closed; world-renowned statisticians like Andrey Kolmogorov or Eugen Slutsky abandoned statistical research."

> Crypto is math. Nobody can monopolize math.

This is pretty damn close though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

Governments were plenty able to monopolize math when computing power was scarce and expensive. That monopoly slipped as computer power got cheaper and more widely accessible. Now everybody has a computer in their pocket that's as fast as the world's fastest supercomputers were in 1990, so the monopoly is well and truly dead.

They monopolized the people that knew the math, written records that described the math, and the hardware that implemented the math. The actual crypto itself cannot be controlled, and in some cases was found by other through cryptanalysis or independently re-discovered.

That distinction is important - physical things like people or papers or computers can be controlled and hidden. It's much harder to keep knowledge itself bottled up, because there is always a risk that someone clever will discover it on their own.

never lost it ... why are hoomans still so naive?

No idea, but naivety does seems to correlate well with idiosyncratic spelling...

The BBCs coverage of this whole thing has been incredibly biased.

Although there is much talk of BBC left wing bias, it is massively pro government - and more so in recent years.

Whilst the BBC is supposed to be non-biased, it is funded by public money. The BBC has to tred carefully around the government and make sure it doesn't upset whoever is currently in power.

http://rightdishonourable.com/2015/10/peter-capaldi-the-bbc-...

They lost control when encryption became a product sold on the free market/distributed among communities. The internet only took away that control even more (and faster).

Since no doubt governments never were able to find a fast way to factor a product of two large prime numbers, they never did have "control" of encryption.

> Cryptography was once controlled by the state and deployed only for military and diplomatic ends. But in the 1970s, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie devised a system which took encryption keys away from the state and marked the start of the so-called "Crypto Wars".

That is an outright lie and the mere fact that this was published as truth shows the BBC is just a propoganda arm of the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25code.html?_r=0

Hell, we are only just now breaking encryption from the 18th century, ffs.

https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/vpns/history-e...

> 1500 BC ancient Assyrian merchants used intaglio, a piece of flat stone carved into a collage of images and some writing to identify themselves in trading transactions. Using this mechanism, they are producing what today we know as 'digital signature.' The public knew that a particular 'signature' belonged to this trader, but only he had the intaglio to produce that signature. Using this mechanism, they are producing what today we know as 'digital signature.' The public knew that a particular 'signature' belonged to this trader, but only he had the intaglio to produce that signature.

------

> So what they said is right, if you specifically know they're talking about public key cryptography and know the history of it. It could have been better written.

> Secondly they're trying to dumb down the history of public key cryptography, and what they mean by "once controlled by the state" is that James H. Ellis & Clifford Cocks discovered and implemented it in secret for the GCHQ in 1970-73. With Malcolm J. Williamson implementing the Diffie–Hellman key exchange in 1974.

William Stanley Jevons basically foreshadowed its existence in the 1800s. There was no way it could be controlled once computers became common.

The fact the GCHQ couldn't keep it secret for even 10 years pretty much shows that.

They never had control except for the briefest of windows and pretending that was really control of cryptography in any substantial way is crazy.

> That is an outright lie and the mere fact that this was published as truth shows the BBC is just a propoganda arm of the UK.

First off there's absolutely no propaganda benefit in that supposed lie.

Secondly they're trying to dumb down the history of public key cryptography, and what they mean by "once controlled by the state" is that James H. Ellis & Clifford Cocks discovered and implemented it in secret for the GCHQ in 1970-73. With Malcolm J. Williamson implementing the Diffie–Hellman key exchange in 1974.

In 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman released Diffie–Hellman key exchange to the non-classified world.

So what they said is right, if you specifically know they're talking about public key cryptography and know the history of it. It could have been better written.

Indeed. Encryption (use of ciphers) has always been the topic of open research. Often times the forefront of research was in government, but not always. RSA was an open cryptosystem, Diffie-Hellman was an open cryptosystem, as were blowfish/twofish and other cryptosystems going back decades. And, as you point out, even older cipher schemes have been around for ages. The mathematical theory of one time pads (which have been extensively used by governments and the military) is over a century old and was developed in the open. Openly developed theory of use of ciphers has been around for centuries.

depends which government you are talking about ;)

They lost control when they didn't want to legislate anti-encryption laws.