All of us spend a great deal of every day transmitting information. Whether at work, during a lunch break, in the car, or simply relaxing, our cell phones, computers, and mouths are busy. Maybe some of us might even write a letter and post it in a mailbox.
In most cases all this goes on out in the open. There's very little regard for privacy. We chat on our cellphones about fairly personal things, oblivious to who's listening. Maybe it's because what we talk about is fairly benign - where we're going, what we've going to do, just keeping track of the other humans in our life.
But what if something serious rears its ugly head? Something like spousal infidelity, or the suspicion that an employee is helping himself to the petty cash box, can cast a shadow over our carefree actions. Things then take on a different tone, and our actions go from overt to covert.
Spying and gathering information in a way that doesn't tip anyone off, or arouse suspicion necessitates a whole different mind set and some pretty clever deception. Our modern spy gear and surveillance techniques have their roots in the past.
A method known as the "dead drop" makes it possible to pass information, objects, and instructions without the risking business of meeting in person. In West Germany in the middle of the 1950s, Polish spies used a drop behind a loose brick at the base of a wall. In a modern twist, Russian officials found a hollow rock filled with electronics in a street in Moscow in 2006. They surmised it was a dead drop used by British spies.
Another way to transmit secret information is to devise a secret code. This has been used through the ages right to the present day. We all have heard of the allies in World War II having teams of people working on deciphering Nazi code. Julius Caesar cleverly sent coded letters in which every letter of the alphabet was shifted three spaces forward.
Today, over 2,000 years later we still find it necessary to utilize codes and cipher. With the incredible growth of computers and the internet, safeguarding information has become paramount in the running of countries and industry. The science of encryption tries to keep one step ahead of hackers and computer viruses.
Perhaps you've heard of cryptography. This is a method of scrambling a message so that only the recipient, who knows the formula, can unscramble what looks like alphabet soup. Remember the interesting scenes in Di Vinci's Code?
A really fascinating way of delivering messages is called steganography. Cleverly, an artist can render a drawing which will appear simply as a work of art. But incorporated into it, completely hidden from the viewer, might be words or maps.
Lord Baden-Powell, who is famous as the founder of the Boy Scouts, once did some ingenious spying using steganography and disguise. The British needed to get information about enemy fortifications in the Balkans. In a well contrived plan, Baden-Powell pretended to be an entomologist, going about drawing wonderful detailed sketches of the butterflies in the region.
Ingeniously these drawings also contained maps that proved extremely useful to the war effort. In this digital age, modern steganography consists of hidden encrypted messages within word or musical files.
Some of the methods used today for spying and surveillance may appear to be new and modern, but in reality they are the end of an evolutionary process that has been going on for thousands of years.
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