Read Online Alphabetical by Michael Rosen - Free Book Online Page A

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 securityservices 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’