Espionage is generally defined as “the use of spies by a government to discover the military and political secrets of othernations” (1), but this is not the case in “Little Brother”. After the terrorist attack in San Francisco, the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) began to spy on the inhabitants of San Francisco. This type of espionage was the government taking away its people’s freedom of speech, as they were tracked everywhere and overall life was made to be much more difficult than need be. Many people,especially the young saw this as wrong, and decided to do something about it; this is where cryptography comes in.
The word "Cryptography" comes from the Greek words kryptos, meaning hidden or secret and graphin, meaning writing. So cryptography literally means "hidden writing", which essential is what it what it is. Cryptography can be defined as the "science or study of the techniques of secret writing, especially code and cipher system methods, and the like." (2). cryptography is used throughout "Little Brother" and is what allows Xnetters to communicate without being caught by the DHS .
Both espionage and cryptography have existed for thousands of years. one of the earliest recorded ciphers was called the Caesar Cipher (3) , named after Julius Caesar. Caesar used this cipher to communicate with his generals without chancing giving their military plans to the always spying enemies. The Caesar Cipher is a substitution cipher, meaning each letter of the alphabet is replaced with another, often in a shift of 3. For example "Cryptography would be "Fubswrjudskb". In order to read the message the recipient would need to know the key.
A perfect example of the importance of cryptography and espionage happened in World War II. Anytime the Allies intercepted German messages they were encrypted with what was called the Enigma Machine (4). Allied espionage became virtual useless until an Enigma Machine was taken from a German Submarine. Even then the cryptography still had to be decoded, and at this time code breaking was not very advanced. Once the Allies broke the code, the war changed, Some would say that without the information gained from the Enigma Machine, the Allies would have lost.
In "Little Brother",cryptography is open for public use, like it is nowadays. The use of cryptography becomes San Francisco’s only passage to freedom of speech. The only problem with this is that it is the Government that has control over the vast majority of code breakers and code breaking machines. Is it aviolation of rights for the Government to use these resources to put away criminals? The issue arose decades ago and is still ever present. The public should have the right for privacy, but what if in order to catch a terrorist, a few people have to be spied on? This had but Government in a difficult position in the real world, aswell as in "Little Brother".
Espionage and Cryptography has led to many successes, but it still has its downfalls. It all comes down to what a Government sees as more important; violating their people's freedom of speech and privacy by decrypting or disallowing cryptography to maybe catch a terrorist, or keeping rights intact .
1 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/espionage
2 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cryptography
the formatting on this very much annoys me
ReplyDeletethats better formatting read this one :)
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