Read the excerpt from The Code Book.However, as with every technology, there is a dark side to encryption. As well as protecting the communications of law-abiding citizens, encryption also protects the communications of criminals and terrorists. Currently, the police use wiretapping as a way of gathering evidence in serious cases, such as organized crime and terrorism, but this would be impossible if criminals used unbreakable ciphers. As we enter the twenty-first century, the fundamental dilemma for cryptography is to find a way of allowing the public and business to use encryption in order to exploit the benefits of the Information Age without allowing criminals to abuse encryption and evade arrest. There is currently an active and vigorous debate about the best way forward, and much of the discussion has been inspired by the story of Phil Zimmermann, a man whose attempts to encourage the widespread use of strong encryption have panicked America's security experts, threatened the effectiveness of the billion-dollar National Security Agency, and made him the subject of an FBI inquiry and a grand jury investigation.
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Read this quote from Zimmermann in The Code Book.In the past, if the government wanted to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, it had to expend a certain amount of effort to intercept and steam open and read paper mail, or listen to and possibly transcribe spoken telephone conversations. This is analogous to catching fish with a hook and a line, one fish at a time. Fortunately for freedom and democracy, this kind of labor-intensive monitoring is not practical on a large scale. Today, electronic mail is gradually replacing conventional paper mail, and is soon to be the norm for everyone, not the novelty it is today. Unlike paper mail, e-mail messages are just too easy to intercept and scan for interesting keywords. This can be done easily, routinely, automatically, and undetectably on a grand scale. This is analogous to driftnet fishing—making a quantitative and qualitative Orwellian difference to the health of democracy.
Read the excerpt from The Code Book.Alternatively, imagine that a bank receives an e-mail from a client, which instructs that all the client's funds should be transferred to a private numbered bank account in the Cayman Islands. Once again, without a handwritten signature, how does the bank know that the e-mail is really from the client? The e-mail could have been written by a criminal attempting to divert the money to his own Cayman Islands bank account. In order to develop trust on the Internet, it is essential that there is some form of reliable digital signature.
Read the excerpt from The Code Book.More than a hundred million e-mails are sent around the world each day, and they are all vulnerable to interception. Digital technology has aided communication, but it has also given rise to the possibility of those communications being monitored.
Which kinds of evidence are included in the excerpt? Select 3 options.
To evaluate the effectiveness of an argument, the reader needs to assess whether the author’s reasons and evidence are:
Read the quote from Zimmermann in The Code Book.A future government could inherit a technology infrastructure that's optimized for surveillance, where they can watch the movements of their political opposition, every financial transaction, every communication, every bit of e-mail, every phone call. Everything could be filtered and scanned and automatically recognized by voice recognition technology and transcribed. It's time for cryptography to step out of the shadows of spies and the military, and step into the sunshine and be embraced by the rest of us.
Read the excerpt from The Code Book.By this stage, sending a PGP encrypted message is becoming quite complicated. The IDEA cipher is being used to encrypt the message, RSA is being used to encrypt the IDEA key, and another stage of encryption has to be incorporated if a digital signature is required. However, Zimmermann developed his product in such a way that it would do everything automatically, so that Alice and Bob would not have to worry about the mathematics. To send a message to Bob, Alice would simply write her e-mail and select the PGP option from a menu on her computer screen. Next she would type in Bob's name, then PGP would find Bob's public key and automatically perform all the encryption. At the same time PGP would do the necessary jiggery-pokery required to digitally sign the message. Upon receiving the encrypted message, Bob would select the PGP option, and PGP would decrypt the message and verify the author. Nothing in PGP was original—Diffie and Hellman had already thought of digital signatures and other cryptographers had used a combination of symmetric and asymmetric ciphers to speed up encryption—but Zimmermann was the first to put everything together in one easy-to-use encryption product, which was efficient enough to run on a moderately sized personal computer.
Read the excerpt from The Code Book.Just as Whit Diffie predicted in the early 1970s, we are now entering the Information Age, a postindustrial era in which information is the most valuable commodity. The exchange of digital information has become an integral part of our society. Already, tens of millions of e-mails are sent each day, and electronic mail will soon become more popular than conventional mail. The Internet, still in its infancy, has provided the infrastructure for the digital marketplace, and e-commerce is thriving. Money is flowing through cyberspace, and it is estimated that every day half the world's Gross Domestic Product travels through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications network. In the future, democracies that favor referenda will begin to have on-line voting, and governments will use the Internet to help administer their countries, offering facilities such as on-line tax declarations.
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