TILT – Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology
tissue. Over time, yet seemingly overnight, we’re becoming reacquainted with this ancient technology. Yet I cannot help but wonder if the time lost between then and now has impacted our enthusiasm towards it...? The word cryptography has its origin from Greek: kryptos (meaning “hidden” or “secret”) and graphein (meaning “writing”), and that is in essence what it is: secret writing. Encryption is to cryptography what composition is to poetics, it is the actual process of obscuring information. In a nutshell? Cryptography is the craft, encryption is the action. Once upon a time cryptography was a very common thing indeed. Then it was an art coquetted with and enjoyed, a tool used by lovers to evade discovery, a method for governments and religious leaders to secure communications, and a means for craftsmen to protect their intellectual property. The earliest known use of cryptography dates back to 1900 BC in the form of non-standard hieroglyphs carved into monuments from the Old Kingdom of Egypt. In Mesopotamia researchers
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discovered clay tablets dating back to 1500 BC containing things like encrypted recipes for pottery glaze. Ancient Hebrew scholars and Greeks dabbled in it, and books on it where published as far back as 800 AD. From the Chinese to the Navajo, from Edgar Allan Poe to Da Vinci, cryptography was employed around the world for eons to intrigue onlookers, shroud messages, and protect information. Now, encryption is a seemingly unattainable and mysterious technology perceptibly reserved for governments and big business. Now encryption is a dualuse technology and potential threat to national security. In the US its export is regulated by the Bureau of Industry and Security, the same body which oversees the export of nuclear and biological weapons. This elevates its mystery, makes it sort of threatening, and surrounds it with a certain taboo. Generally speaking, it is intimidating. At least, we are intimidated by the complex technology that it tends to be presented as today, the terms in which it is described by technologists and engineers,
and not least the perceived effort and cost it requires to implement. But like a microwave, regardless of its hidden complexity, broken down it’s a quite ordinary thing. A microwave heats food = encryption locks information. It can be as complicated as the scrambling of satellite signals to prevent piracy, or as simple as a two school children speaking Pig Latin. Word Jumbles, Anagrams, Acrostics and Find-a-Word games are all examples of cryptography used for entertainment and mental development. Teenage slang and “leetspeak” are forms of encryption intended to obscure the true contents of conversations and messages. Tic Tac of the racetrack and hand signals in baseball games are also forms of encrypting information so that it may be deciphered only by those who possess a special knowledge, a key that determines meaning. The taboo surrounding encryption is largely the creation of government and enterprise; it’s intended to keep us at arm’s length, making it something of a privilege. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google put it this way: “If you have something that you don't want anyone to