Care About the Meaning of the Existence of Crypto

You are a human being. Only our kind can care about the meaning of things. Computers may seem to think, but they do not care. They miss the meaning of the existence of cryptographic exchanges. It is for us, the living, to be dedicated to the unfinished work of writing the messages that computers hide from each other.

Cryptography is a part of civilization. It still exists for armies to use, and it also has taken on a meaning for bankers and partners in joy. Often, the person who cares about crypto is a single man who has a hobby of proposing a block cipher. The most famous hobbyists have code names like scott19u and adacrypt. In El Paso and London they persevere against insurmountable prejudices to promote the algorisms that they care about intensely. On the Usenet location called sci.crypt, those happy individuals offered their computer programs to a skeptical crowd of professionals and dilettantes. Almost daily, their hobby was honed in public. Outnumbering those few courageous self-promoters are the obsessed insulters. They lurk on the Usenet Newsgroups with flames that are well rehearsed to instantly harass and to categorically denounce the efforts of the joy-filled hobby-level cryptographers. To rain on someone's parade brings some grim relief into their bitter cores. But also, government agents monitor their progress and attack the programmers to attempt to induce emotional disease into their once-cheerful psyches. With enough damage and insults, they may prevent large-key algorithms from being accepted by onlookers.

It is a tragic and comic spectacle to watch the caring programmers be assaulted with every invective in the English language for the crime of posting a few paragraphs about the meaning of their ambitions. Why do those lone programmers still persist in posting their concepts to a mob of hateful flamers? Because they love the complicated block ciphers which they have invented. They imagine that they are adding a new trail into the boolean jungle, where old cryptographic algorithms are not trusted. While civilization has crumbled during the Bush-Obama war crimes against Iraq, and with the simultaneous fall of justice and freedom, the amateur cryptographers have prepared private ciphers to someday serve us all. Their unsullied encryption software may be intended to be used to coordinate an imagined revolution.