44 | Part 1 / France / Documentation
proved efficient and is riddled with legal and ethical issues. The debate on the enciphering of conversations proves how difficult it is to find the right balance between security and privacy. While the metadata gathering programme ceased on 29th November under the Freedom Act, intelligence services try to make the debate swing in their favour using the Paris attacks as an argument. Such issues were already at the core of the ‘crypto-wars’, which started in 1993 with the internet boom and the wish of the secret services to limit the chances of hiding away online. But a group of Californian Libertarians, known as ‘cypherpunks’ started developing advanced enciphering techniques meant for all users to help preserve the net from State interferences (Julian Assange, who founded Wikileaks in 2006, became a member in 1995). Also around this time, in 1991, Phil Zimmerman programmed a powerful tool named PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), a secure type of messaging software developed following Zimmerman’s concerns over what he saw as a disproportionate intrusion of law into citizens’ privacy. By freely distributing his software, he had strongly provoked the American government. Its use was not liberalised until Clinton’s mandate and the development of e-commerce (which requires cryptography to ensure the security and confidentiality of data circulating on the net, particularly for financial transactions). Around 2005, the defenders of making cryptography accessible to everyone thought they had the upper hand. However, such vantage was then shaken up by Snowden’s revelations on the range of NSA’s surveillance programmes and by the recent attacks in Paris, which reignite the crypto wars.
cryptography was very much a military sector secret and only after this period did it become of public use and a science studied in universities. Consequently, secret codes were gradually replaced by algorithms. In 1992, at the time when cryptography wars had reached their peak across the Atlantic, William Gibson, the science fiction author who coined the term “cyberspace”, and the artist Dennis Ashbaugh presented Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), an extremely limited-edition work of art consisting of a large printed volume containing a 3.5 floppy disk with a 300-line electronic poem on it. The poem was about memory and loss and was designed to be read only once, as it was programmed to encrypt itself after one use. Cryptography analysts managed to crack the Agrippa code twenty years later. How long will NSA analysts take to decode the small gift David Huerta sent them as a form of provocation? In May 2014 the hacker artist, who was a co-organiser of the Art Hack Day and the New York Cryptoparty, did not send a floppy disk but a DIY tape to the NSA headquarters. The parcel, sent through the good old postal service, contained an encrypted mixtape using an Arduino board in a transparent case containing the “soundtrack for the modern surveillance state”. The cassette could not be listened to without the password necessary to unlock the private key, which would allow to decipher the SD card where the music was stored.
“Although the fact that the NSA had several programmes to For a long time cryptography, the art of hiding the content of exploit and intercept all types of systems has been brought to information, was only used in the diplomatic and military fields light, enciphering remains the blind spot of NSA’s all-seeing eyes”, and considered a weapon of war. The first enciphering methods argues David Huerta, who through these actions wishes to revive date back to ancient times and have improved over time through the cypherpunk tradition of the 1990s. “It is also a reminder that the development of several enciphering machines, thereby the rules of mathematics are more powerful than the laws of playing a key role in both World Wars. This discreet science of even the most powerful states”, Huerta believes. secret writings has also fascinated writers and artists, such as The Berlin Telekommunisten, specialists of “dis-communication Edgar Allan Poe. For instance, cryptography is a key topic in tools”, suggest skirting the digital panopticon by adopting Poe’s detective short story The Gold-Bug (1843), in which an old espionage methods such as the good old “numbers station”. parchement leads to a treasure. Other main examples of fictional These shortwave radio stations, first used during World War I, cryptography are Jules Verne’s novels Journey to the Centre of produced broadcasts reading out lists of numbers and coded the Earth (1864) and Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (1881). messages meant for on-the-field spies. The potential whistle-bloPoe wrote novels, poems and articles on cryptography and also wer in you was encouraged to join this underground network at challenged his readers to send him coded messages that he the Transmediale Festival in 2014, through a printed card that would then try to decipher. At that time, cryptography played a was supposed to help decode the messages which were randomly key role in society. We have to bear in mind that individuals did broadcast on the RebootFM and π-Node radio stations. not use the Internet or telephones at the time and that letters “This project was not really about enciphering but rather a could be dangerous and compromising if found and read by reaction to the tendency in hacker communities to see ‘circumothers. Following the telecommunications boom, cryptography ventionism’ as a solution in itself”, toned down Baruch Gottlieb, developed around the middle of the century by incorporating one of the authors who question this ‘crypto-utopia’, which he information-coding techniques. However, until the 1970s believes carries with it new forms of privileges and asymmetries.