I chose the beginning of chapter 17, when Marcus and Ange went to the journalist, Barbara Stratford, to expose the rampant abuses of power that were occurring in San Francisco. During this, they discovered that Barbara herself had covered the original ‘crypto wars’ in the 90’s. Barbara describes how the government had labeled cryptography as a munition and made it illegal to use it or export it, all in the name of national security. While I thought this was really interesting, the next sentence blew my mind. This means that we had ILLEGAL math. MATH, made illegal.

Can you imagine there being a time when certain equations and formulae were considered illegal? This interests me most because less than two decades after this illegal math, we are taking a class specifically about this illegal math. We’ve seen in class how cryptography has been used throughout history, and it always has been, and probably always will be, a part of life in government. However, it was always that it was only accessible to the wealthy, and those in government. No one else could afford the knowledge required, so we couldn’t keep secrets from the government. With the rapid spread of computers and advancement in technology, suddenly average citizens could afford to encode their messages, and it is very interesting to me that the government was so threatened by this that they felt the need to ban this knowledge.

Of course, it is also my opinion that, like Prohibition, this just proliferated the use of cryptography, but with even less government control. My favorite part of class so far has been our discussions about the intersection of cryptography, government, and privacy, which is why Little Brother, and especially this chapter hold my interest so well. With cryptography and cryptanalysis becoming ever more advanced, it will be exciting to see how the government handles all this as well.