🚀 go-pugleaf

honig@ics.uci.edu (David A. Honig) writes:

>This won't work for speech but for letters and radio (and is amenable
>to machine translation),

>If you use a method of coding your messages where:
> You use ordinary phrases to mean other things,  
> And you use a shared, trusted codebook ( translation lookup-table),
>Then you could use unsecure channels to communicate securely.

I'm sure the Chineese student organizations can easily find out all they
need to know about one time pad cyphers but this is not the issue.
I don't know about you but if I knew that my government was listening
in on my phone conversations and I further knew that the penalty for
"crimes against the state" was death, I sure as hell not take a chance
with my life that the cypher would work.  The fact is that when the
government controls the rules, it really does not matter whether it can
determine what you meant.  IT only matters that the government has had
its suspicions aroused enough to arrest you and present you to a firing
squad.

There are methods that dissitants can use to communicate in such situations.
Few involve electronics of any kind and none involve a public switched 
network.

-- 
John De Armond, WD4OQC                     | Manual? ... What manual ?!? 
Sales Technologies, Inc.    Atlanta, GA    | This is Unix, My son, You 
...!gatech!stiatl!john    **I am the NRA** | just GOTTA Know!!!