Alphabetical (9 page)

In June 2013, as I've been writing this book, and indeed this particular chapter, an event has had a devastating impact on our ideas about the secrecy of encryption. The first decades of the internet have seen new literacies emerging. These are not simply matters of how we configure letters, words and phrases but are also about the nature of who participates in conversations. Using the instruments of instant messaging, emails and social networks, we've created worldwide interest groups, people who want to write on the internet about things they're interested in. I am an avid ‘user' of these. Alongside that, I buy train tickets and secondhand books, and spend hours searching and researching anything from family history to the weather details at our holiday destination. Edward Snowden's revelation was that not one single part, not one tiny jot of it, is secret. It is all available to the security services of
one country. It has all been stored and this too is available to the security services.

In other words, our communications can be analysed in two key ways: instantaneously and historically. Put another way, we can be ‘spotted' saying or doing something at a given moment, or the pattern of our existence over time can be captured and described. However, this isn't truly public knowledge. I don't have the technological skills to do this myself, nor do I have one of the few jobs which would enable me to get into any of this spotting and storing. The knowledge and the jobs belong to only a tiny number of people, the security services of one country, who choose whether to share what they find with their elected representatives or, indeed, with anyone at all from other countries. Or not.

In one sense, this is no different from Elizabeth I's team of spies collecting knowledge about plots against the Crown, and, for example, deciphering messages between Mary Queen of Scots and her conspiratorial chums. The regime defended itself by finding out what people who endangered that regime were saying to each other. Picture Mary confined in Chartley Hall, Staffordshire. A Catholic supporter called Gilbert Gifford smuggles letters to her by the ruse of arranging with a local brewer for them to be concealed in the bung that plugged a barrel of beer. Mary herself didn't splosh around in the beer, her servants did that for her. In March 1586, in the Plough, near Temple Bar, a dashing young blade of the same religious persuasion, one Anthony Babington, gathered together six conspirators suitable for planning the springing of Mary from her prison, the assassination of Queen Elizabeth, inciting a rebellion and raising support from abroad. All they needed was for Mary to agree to this Shakespearean plot.

Mary heard about this from her French supporters and wrote
to Babington indicating that she looked forward to hearing from him; Gifford was the courier. Surely all that needed to be done now was for Babington and Mary to communicate via the beer-barrel bung. Yes, but Babington made doubly sure of concealment by encrypting his letter, using twenty-three symbols for letters, such as the Greek letter ‘theta' for ‘g', the infinity sign for ‘h', and ‘delta' for ‘s'. He also used thirty-five numbers, letters and signs to substitute for some whole words: ‘2' for ‘and', ‘x' for ‘in' and so on. There were five other symbols for blanks or spaces and for double letters. Wily Gifford knew his way round the underground and highly endangered Catholic community of Tudor England and he made various detours in order to throw off possible pursuers. A good man to have on your side, was Gifford. One problem: he wasn't on Mary's side. He was acting as a double agent and for at least a year he had been showing Mary's letters to Elizabeth's spymaster-in-chief, Sir Francis Walsingham.

Walsingham had a cipher school going in London with one Thomas Phelippes (Philips) as his main man, who was described at the time as small, short-sighted and ‘slender every way, dark yellow haired on the head, and clear yellow bearded, eaten in the face with small pox'. Phelippes worked on the ‘frequency principle', matching the frequency of symbols to the frequency of real letters in normal writing, cracked the cipher and the codes, figured out what Babington was up to and told Walsingham. The Tudor regime was extremely well geared up for torturing, disembowelling and executing (in that order) its enemies, in particular Catholics. The point for Walsingham was not simply rounding up a dashing blade like Babington. The real prize was Mary herself. To secure her, they needed Mary's authorization of the Babington plot, otherwise Elizabeth wouldn't authorize Mary's execution. Sure enough, on 17 July 1586, Mary
incriminated herself by talking of the ‘design'. Phelippes deciphered the letter and marked it with a gallows sign.

But Walsingham was a belt-and-braces spymaster. He wanted names, more names. So he asked Phelippes to forge a postscript (in the cipher) on Mary's letter to Babington, saying: ‘I would be glad to know the names and qualities of the six gentlemen which are to accomplish the designment [plot].' Babington and his pals were ‘cut down, their privities were cut off, bowelled alive and seeing, and quartered'. (For the record, it was their bodies that were cut into quarters, not their bowels or privities.)

Mary tried it on at her trial: ‘Can I be responsible for the criminal projects of a few desperate men which they planned without my knowledge and participation?' It didn't wash and she was beheaded in front of 300 people in the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle.

The Snowden story is similar to that of Mary Queen of Scots in that it involves the codes and ciphers that are available to the rulers of a country or countries to defend themselves. In another way, though, it is completely different. No matter how suspicious we have been about the visibility of internet communication, many of us probably believed that our passwords were ‘secure' and that most of our internet ‘history' got deleted and died. We didn't invent these encryptions. They were given to us. Part of this false sense of security (literally and metaphorically) is intertwined with what we've understood about ‘encryption'. If, like me, you are illiterate in relation to the language(s) by which computers turn keyboard taps into words and images, then ‘encryption' is a piece of mystical babble. It's like saying: my account is quite secure because it's ‘abracadabra-ed'. It turns out that this piece of babble is not only mystical for people like me, it's also nonsense. It's not secure at all. Usually, the reason
why encryptions are not secure is because extremely clever people unlock them. In this case, though, something different has happened.

One way of relating the story of global power is to tell the stories of how people in power have tried to make their messages secret whilst trying to read the secret messages of others: it's the history of codes, ciphers and various kinds of encryptions. Novels, films and memoirs have taken us into top-secret rooms and shown us skulduggery in high places, assassinations, lone unhappy geniuses, cranks, saviours and mass murderers. At times, the fate of millions, it's been suggested, has rested on code-setting or code-breaking. The small-room, top-secret-clique image of encryption still holds good with the Edward Snowden revelation – but with some key differences.

Before the age of the internet, the security services used ‘intelligence' to locate and observe people. In those days, most people thought that if something was described as ‘confidential' this meant that it was kept confidential between the participants, whilst knowing that, under extreme conditions, the police or the security services could get hold of it. What's more, if for any reason you encoded what you said or did, then someone would have to decode it in order to find out what was going on. All this has been wiped away. Now, the ‘intelligence' has already been gathered. In effect, it's sitting in the security services' office, in the huge silos of stored electronic data we provide to the security services.

No electronic communication is confidential. The fact that a piece of electronic communication has been encoded is irrelevant. It doesn't even have to be decoded – because we've handed over the keys to the codes even as we thought we had encrypted or encoded something! We are each a double agent cunningly acting undercover against ourselves on behalf of the security
services of one country. Snowden's name must go down in the new histories of encryption as the man who revealed this.

This chapter is not called ‘C is for Codes' because of a fiddly technical distinction which I'll stick to: if I say my real name is Michael Rosen but my undercover name is ‘Alphabetico', that's a code. A whole word is substituted. If I find a way of substituting each of the letters of my name with other letters, numbers or any other kind of sign according to a principle or system, that's a cipher. So, if I write:

A = 1

B = 2

C = 3

D = 4

and so on through the alphabet, I could substitute the ‘M', ‘I', ‘C', ‘H', ‘A', ‘E' and ‘L' of my name with numbers and write it as:

13  9  3  8  15  12

Alternatively I could write:

A = B

B = C

C = D

and so on with the two alphabets lined up next to each other as I've begun to do here. If I use that parallel alignment of alphabets, I could choose to write my messages using the letter that comes after the letter I would normally use.

I could write this as a formula. My cipher is N + 1 where
‘N' = any letter in the real alphabet and N + 1 takes me to the letter I will use for my ciphered message.

My first name would now be:

Njdibfm

Clearly, you can create ciphers on the principle of N plus any number or N minus any number. You can do this by writing out alphabets on to two strips of paper and sliding one alphabet underneath the other. You'll need to write the alphabet more than once on the strips so that every letter has a counterpart to a letter on the other strip! This is a good game to play with children.

What you would have created here is known as a ‘monoalphabetic cipher'. In
Lives of the Caesars
, Suetonius explains that Julius Caesar used a monoalphabetic code. His formula was N + 3.

If you want to turn this into a game, try this, a party trick I have called ‘Cave, Caesar!' (If you want to pronounce it as it's thought the Romans pronounced it, you can say ‘Kah-way Ky-sar' with ‘Ky' rhyming with ‘fly'. It means ‘Watch out, Caesar!').

Caesar (probably you) sits with his followers in the room, and Cassius the codebreaker says that whatever cipher (‘code') Caesar uses he will be able to crack it. He needs to do this, he says, because Caesar is getting too big for his boots and he's keeping an eye on him. Caesar says that Cassius thinks he's clever but he's not that clever. Cassius leaves the room, ready to take on the challenge. Someone can be chosen to stand guard on him to show that Cassius is not cheating by listening to what's going on from outside the door.

Caesar tells his followers that they are going to choose an
object in the room, and they're going to write it in a ‘code'. He suggests to his followers that they use the N + 3 formula which is his favourite and no one has ever cracked it yet. Caesar and his followers choose an object, let's say it's ‘table'. Make sure that it's a suggestion from one of the followers and not from Caesar. Vote on it so that it's obviously not been chosen by Caesar. Caesar shows his followers how to make the two strips of the alphabets and apply the formula by sliding the strips. This will deliver ‘table' as ‘wdeoh'. Hide the strips.

Call Cassius back into the room. Cassius sits down and watches Caesar's hand. When Caesar hands over the ciphered message ‘wdeoh', he does so with three fingers on the paper but in a way that the others won't see. Cassius reads that as ‘N + 3' and cracks the code, putting on a great show of staring at the letters and doing magic signs and various kinds of hocus-pocus. Cassius then warns Caesar and his followers that he knows everything he's up to and he had better watch out: ‘Cave, Caesar!'

Someone in the room may say that Caesar and Cassius obviously worked this out beforehand. So suggest that Cassius goes out again. Choose another object. Change the formula to N + any other number. Call Cassius back, revealing this new number with the same method, leaving your fingers on the page when you hand over the ciphered message.

Now, we can step up the complexity of this, if you have either the mind or the machine to do it. What you can do is change the formula each time you write a letter. So, you could decide to start with N + 1 for the first letter, then N + 2 for the second and so on all through the message you want to send. Or you could make it more complicated by using any sequence of numbers to decide how you make the cipher. You could use your phone number or the repeated use of your flat or house number.

Another way of doing this without using numbers is to make
an alphabet square. Your alphabet square is made up of the twenty-six letters across the top as your ‘real' alphabet. Exactly underneath, you write out the alphabet twenty-six times. However, each time you write an alphabet one below the other, you slide it along by one letter. So, now, stretching down below each letter of the ‘real' alphabet, you have twenty-six new ways of writing each of the letters from your real alphabet along the top. When you write a word using this square, you could write the first letter of your word using the first line, the second letter using the second line, the third letter the third line and so on. So the word ‘table' would be made up of ‘u' from the first line, ‘c' from the second line, ‘e' from the third line, ‘p' from the fourth line, ‘j' from the fifth line, making ‘ucepj' as ‘table', using the formula N + 1, N + 2, N + 3, N + 4, N + 5.