What surprised me most in the first chapter of this text was just how old cryptography is. I guess I had never really thought about it’s origins before the reading. I thought it was really interesting to learn of the origins and to begin learning some history. It made me draw come comparisons to cryptography today. Cryptography really has come a long way since Queen Mary used it from her jail cell. Although it’s incredibly unlikely that a ruling leader would ever be held in jail by another, if the situation would arise, and they needed to use cryptography, it would happen quite differently. First of all, I think they would have a better understanding of the likelihood of the messages being intercepted and broken, and would not use such plain terms to describe their plan. Mary and Babington’s foolishness reminded me of in middle school, a group of girls would speak in pig latin, thinking nobody else could understand them. Unfortunately for them, many people also knew of this “secret” language, and those who didn’t quickly caught on. Another advancement is simply the difficulty of the cipher that would be used today. In this day and age, a simple substitution cipher, like the one used by Mary and Babington, would be deciphered in minutes. To really keep something private, a much more advanced and complicated cipher would be needed.