Before the telegraph was invented and introduced to society, the only way of sending messages was through written means. If you wanted to send a message to a receiver that lived far away, you needed a middleman – someone to transport the message. The telegraph effectively removed the worry that your message would be intercepted or stolen along the way. Although you knew that the message was being sent to the correct machine, however, you didn’t know that it was reaching its intended receiver in its correct form. You had to trust that the telegraph operator would be honest and secretive in translating/delivering the message. There was essentially no way of confirming that the correct person was at the other end of the receiver. Additionally, some people wanted to send messages that they were uncomfortable with others reading at all. This led to the encryption of messages even before being given to the operator. The desire to keep messages secret from the sender and protect the message in case it didn’t reach its intended receiver have motivated the use of a more secure cipher, the Vignère cipher. This cipher, more complicated than the monoalphabetic cipher, remained the standard for many years.
After the telegraph, the telephone was invented. At first, though, the telephone still didn’t allow for direct, secure communication. There were telephone operators that would connect calls, and they could potentially listen in on calls without the either line knowing. However, calls became more secure with the invention of the rotary dial. And now, we communicate through talk, text, or email, typically through our smartphones. Nowadays, most people communicate primarily through text or email, not over the phone. Our communications are surely much more secure now than they were years, even decades ago, but I worry that our messages are never truly secure. There are always ways that companies, hackers, or the government can access anything that travels via the web. The only form of truly secure communication is face-to-face.
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