Ed's View - Keeping Honest People Honest

[Ed Milbourn]

In April 1803, President Thomas Jefferson gave Meiwether Lewis (of the Lewis and Clark Expedition fame) a rather sophisticated key-based cipher table. This table was to be used to encrypt messages intended for the President in Washington if those messages would be sent via a foreign carrier, such as a foreign ship, when the expedition reached the Pacific Ocean. But, alas, the cipher table was never used as no ships came while the expedition was camped there. The point of this anecdote is that the concept of encrypted messages for security and content protection reasons is not new. In fact, language encryption has been around as long as man has been literate (about 10,000 years). It has been surmised that encoding words and speech is one of the reasons different languages developed. May be, but one thing is common with all of the various encrypting schemes through the ages - they all have been broken, no matter how sophisticated.


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