People of the Lie

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/09/people-of-the-lie/

We live in the world of make-believe, a world controlled by ciphers such as Wall Street, Corporate America, the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon. These ciphers enjoy the enthusiastic support of the media, the academy, and the shamans to whom we entrust the care of body, mind, and soul. They reside in cipherspace, a euphemism for what French writer Albert Camus called the absurd.

In the parlance of communications intelligence, a cipher is a secret message deliberately encoded to mislead unintended recipients. International intelligence operatives routinely employ ciphers to communicate classified information and secret messages among themselves via telecommunication networks. So, too, do those engaged in espionage, counterespionage, terrorism, and anti-terrorism. More recently, ciphers have been used to protect the confidentiality of e-mail messages, electronic funds transfers, credit card transactions, and cell phone conversations.

Ciphers are often used to disguise messages encoded to mislead virtually everyone, whether they be citizens, consumers, stockholders, employees, voters, viewers, readers, Internet junkies, students, patients, or parishioners. They are a sophisticated form of lying and deceit—one of the most important instruments of mass manipulation and social control in our culture. A person, such as a political leader, who transmits misleading messages is also a cipher.

first learned about ciphers from a Czech political science professor, Vladimir Suchan, who had become disillusioned with communist apparatchiks in Prague and Moscow as well as U.S government officials and viewed them all as ciphers.

More at the link --

[Enthusiast]

1. Thank you. K&R.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. This essay is a bit confused.

Messaging and subtexts and framing are really not the same thing as cryptology. One is the art of propaganda - the science of persuasion perfected on Madison Avenue, the other is the craft and science of sending secrets securely from one place to another. These are not the same things at all. The point of cryptology is to keep outsiders from learning a secret by using a code to hide that secret. The point of propaganda is to persuade people to think in certain ways.

Oh and the statement "Without knowledge of the cryptosystem it is impossible to convert the ciphertext back to the real message, the plaintext" is just naive and wrong. The cryptologists work just as hard at breaking codes as they do at making them. 'Difficult' not 'impossible'.