Secret Codes

If you communicate with emojis, you might be using a secret code that people who speak another language can understand, but some who speak your own language can't. That's the essence of secret codes. You send information you intend someone to understand and hide your messages from everyone else. Of course, spies do this all the time. They report plans, troop movements, economic conditions, and the health and characteristics of key officials enemies want to hide.

     Not only is it necessary to write secrets in code and in things like lemon juice that disappears until the paper its written on is heated, but methods for sending messages also are important. Short radio bursts are used and messages are hidden in James Bond-type devices. During the Revolutionary War, Nathan Hale, considered the first U.S. spy, unfortunately  hid a secret message in his boot which was easily discovered when he was caught by the British.

     You and a friend might make up a secret code that gives words different meanings or uses the third letter in every word to make a sentence when those third letters are written together. If you want to send your message during a class, how would you get it to your friend three rows away? Or you might wrap a long strip of paper around a baseball bat, write your message vertically on the paper, unwind the paper and hide it somewhere. In order to read your message, a friend would have to wind the paper around a bat that was the same size as yours.

     Decoding mistakes can happen. In 1916, Elizabeth Wells Gallup claimed she found coded messages from Sir Francis Bacon hidden in Shakespeare's scripts. Using only words written in one particular typeface, she found a message Bacon left in Richard II that led her to believe he said he wrote the play. When Elizabeth and William Friedman looked at Gallup's work in 1955, they found the different typefaces she relied on were caused by accidental primitive printing technology, not the intentional work of Bacon or anyone else.

     Suppose you and a friend have a secret meeting or message hiding place. Spies have left messages in pumpkins, under bridges, under floor boards, and in bottles in the hollows of trees. You can signal your friend that you want to meet or you have left a message by methods similar to those spies have used. Where spies have put chalk marks on mail boxes, you could put a chalk mark on a friend's locker. Instead of putting a flower pot on a balcony, you could put a toy at your window or blink a flashlight. Slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad used to look for safe houses that had statues positioned in a certain way out front.

     Fans of Harry Potter know his owl Hedwig carried secret messages. Homing pigeons performed the same task in wartime. Could you train a pet to do the job?

     Secret codes often are very difficult to decipher. Letters carved into the sculpture, "Krypto," outside the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency remained a puzzle until an analyst spent eight years on his lunch hours using pencil and paper to figure out three of the sections on the stone. Even then, what the message meant was unclear. The movie, The Imitation Game, showed how Germans in World War II created an impossible to crack Enigma code that caused a British decoder at its secret Bletchley facility to build a computer to try millions of letter combinations. That didn't work until one person realized each transmission began with a weather report. By comparing each day's weather with the letters used in that day's secret message the number of combinations the computer had to try was reduced and messages Germans sent regarding enemy ships they intended to destroy could be read faster.

     Nowadays, it is possible to both code and decode secret messages by computer. It also is possible to hack into messages sent by computer unless security measures, such as the use of secure passwords and default passwords, are taken. TIME magazine (Nov. 7, 2016) reported that on October 21, 2016 cyber hackers even tapped into the unsecured Internet of Things (remotely controlled internet connected surveillance cameras, printers, digital video recorders) and used them to activate a virus, Mirai, (the Japanese word for "the future") that overwhelmed servers at one company with malicious traffic that prevented legitimate users from reaching intended receivers. The tasks of preparing a truly secret code and transferring secret codes are becoming more difficult every day.

(For more information about how emojis communicate, see the earlier post, "Communicate without Words.")