Cryptography

“In other words, when participating in networked publics, many participants embrace a widespread public-by-default, private-through-effort mentality… By focusing on what to keep private rather than what to publicize, teens often inadvertently play into another common rhetorical crutch—the notion that privacy is necessary only for those who have something to hide. Indeed, many teens consciously seek out privacy when they’re trying to restrict access to a narrower audience either out of respect or out of fear.”

I disagree with Boyd’s assertion of public-by-default, private-through-effort and that teenagers have to make a conscious choice on what to make private online rather than public, supporting the belief that privacy isn’t needed if you have nothing to hide. When you post something to social media, you are making a conscious choice to post said thing. I believe the opposite: the default is actually private, and it takes effort to make that post public. As a result, I would say most teenagers take quite a bit of time to think about what photos they are going to show to their follows prior to posting. No one is going to post a picture of themselves without assessing how they look in it first. Many of the forms of social media communication Boyd includes in the chapter are pretty much extremely obsolete and outdated to a certain extent: blogging, posting on friends’ Facebook walls, status updates, basically the use of Facebook as a whole.

Private social media is not an indication of someone having something to hide. Private social media is also usually not created out of respect or fear. Many people  do not want strangers looking at photos of them and their friends, hence making an Instagram account public. In addition, I rarely post on my Snapchat story, not because I’m committing crimes, but because I understand that the majority of my followers do not care about what is happening in my life. If I wanted to share something, I would share it with my friends on my private story.

I think that Boyd’s assessment of social media in teens isn’t totally applicable to the current young adult generation as it is out-of-date. Despite the book only being published 5 years ago, social media use changes so rapidly that many apps and websites once widely-used fall out of popularity extremely quickly. I can think of several apps that were popular 5 years ago in middle school (Kik, Vine, Omegle, Tumblr, etc.) that no one uses anymore because they have been shut down or aren’t trendy or fun any longer. It’s not only the types of social media platforms that are constantly changing, but the way social media is used. Perhaps 5 or 10 years ago, it was common to post song lyrics to your hundreds of Facebooks friends, but that is simply not the case anymore. Teens today generally find people to share too much on social media as weird or annoying.

Lastly, I think it will be close to impossible for an adult to understand teen social media use and culture unless he or she is fully immersed in the experience (which the majority are not). There are so many facets to how we use social media that you can’t get the whole picture just through research or interviewing someone. It could honestly be equated to a foreign country’s culture or language: no matter how much studying you do, you can’t completely understand it unless you’re a part of it.

I enjoyed seeing Singh present arguments for both sides of the issue on if strong encryption should be available to the general public or not. One of the claims that I thought was particularly strong was the comparison of strong encryption to gloves. Singh included a quote by Ron Rivest, one of the inventors of RSA, which states, “It is poor policy to clamp down indiscriminately on a technology just because some criminals might be able to use it to their advantage. For example, any US citizen can freely buy a pair of gloves, even thought a burglar might use them to ransack a house without leaving fingerprints.” I thought this assertion brought up an excellent point: criminals can use basically any non-harmful thing to their advantage, so why outlaw said thing for every day people? In addition, guns are legal, despite them being extremely dangerous for non-criminals and criminals alike. Why would someone advocate for firearm accessibility, yet consider encryption dangerous because it could keep criminal communication secret?

Another argument I thought was compelling in support of encryption availability was the notion that businesses require strong encryption for online commerce.  The Code Book was written in 1999. Today, e-commerce has reached a size far greater than Singh’s world 20 years ago. With this fact, it is more important than ever to have secure online encryption as so many purchases are done through the Internet. Consumers don’t want their credit card information stolen, and businesses don’t want their customer databases hacked. If strong encryption wasn’t available to the public, no one would want to conduct business online, which would be disastrous for today’s economy.

There were many mathematical concepts related to modern cryptography introduced in this chapter. One topic I was familiar with already was the use of binary digits and modular arithmetic because we had learned about them in class. However, I was not aware of modular arithmetic prior to taking this course and I had only the most basic understanding of binary numbers. I still do not have much knowledge on either topic beyond an elementary level. For example, I was confused by the idea of the Y^x (mod P) function. I do not really understand how it works and how it relates to encryption and communication. I am not sure if this speaks to Singh’s ability (or lack of ability) to explain technical mathematical topics, or my ability (or lack of ability) to understand technical mathematical topics through words rather than examples and someone showing me how they work.

I was also confused about the concept of the mangler function as what the mangler function is exactly was never elaborated upon in the chapter. However, this might be because the function is too complicated or complex for the average individual to understand, so Singh didn’t even bother trying to break it down. I think Singh does a so-so job explaining the more technical sides to cryptography throughout his book, not just this chapter. Some explanations make sense, such as in the first chapter when he introduces the different types of historical ciphers. Others have me completely lost, such as his explanation for how the enigma machine functions. (I still don’t understand how it works!) I understand it is very difficult to explain such advanced and complex concepts to people with no knowledge on the topic, and this will be important to keep in mind when explaining how our cipher works for our podcasts.