Codes, Code-Breakers, Electronic Communications, Pearl Harbor Day

December 7th is remembered as Pearl Harbor Day. Codes, code-breaking, and electronic communications played a vital part in World War II.  Codes and code-breaking have been around since the early Egyptians.  With the advent of electronic communications--first radio, then Internet and digital communications, codes and code-breaking have become always more complex.

There has been some confusion as to how much of the Japanese plans for "Operation Z" (Pearl Harbor Attack) the USA was aware of before the attack.  Some of this came out in the movie, Pearl Harbor.

Dan Brown, in his 2009 novel, The Lost Symbol, uses the concept of codes, code-breaking and electronic communications in much of his book.  Encryption as a way of communicating secretly has been an important art throughout the ages to hide "sacred mysteries" as well as to communicate war plans, strategies for business, and anything else anyone wants to conceal.

In today's world of YouTube, the Internet, e-mail, blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, and more, it seems hard to believe that we have any secrets we want to hold on to.  On the other hand, we don't want an identity thief to take our social security number, credit card number, etc., so we all have some privacy issues we would like to control.

Many programs do have encryption capabilities, though most of these programs can be decrypted by government agencies when they have a need to do so.

We are encouraged to think of anything we share on the Internet as being "public."  That is probably the more accurate way to thinking about what we "publish" via the Internet.