MCViewPoint

by Nick Giambruno

That’s precisely why the US government stopped the publication of this information. They threatened the MIT researchers with federal prison if they proceeded under the pretext that the US government considered cryptography a military munition. Those who distributed it would be treated no differently than arms traffickers.

A Preemptive Strike Against an Orwellian Future

“If I disappear, make sure this gets out.”

That’s what Mark Miller, a young student at Yale, told his closest friends.

He knew what he was sitting on had revolutionary potential and that powerful people had disappeared others for much less.

Miller was steadfast. He wanted to get this information out, even if it was over his dead body.

In 1977, a group of brilliant researchers at MIT made an astonishing discovery—public-key cryptography.

It was a mathematical system for encrypting information so that only the intended recipient could read it. It would otherwise take millions of years for the world’s most powerful supercomputers to crack.

Cryptography, or the practice of encoding information, is as old as civilization.

One of the oldest known cryptography uses dates back to around 600 BC when the ancient Spartans would pass encrypted messages on thin papyrus sheets. To decrypt the message, the recipient could wrap the papyrus around a scytale (a cylinder of varying dimensions).

The words written on the papyrus itself were gibberish. But you could decrypt the message if you had the right scytale. This is how the Spartans sent and received secret military plans.

Today, computers allow for radically more sophisticated cryptography.

That’s why the discovery of public-key cryptography was a development of historical significance.

Never before had unbreakable cryptography been available to the average person. It had always been a government monopoly, and they didn’t want to give it up.

The MIT researchers broke that monopoly in 1977.

The average person could now use public-key cryptography to preserve the privacy of their communications from anyone, including the world’s most powerful governments.

Public-key cryptography altered the status quo between the rulers and the ruled. It was similar to the invention of gunpowder or the printing press.

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