Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012)

http://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/

by denzil_correa • 11 years ago

90 15 11 years ago

Kinnard2• 11 years ago

One of the best pieces ever published in WIRED magazine.

Indeed.. the author breaks down in laymen terms how the cipher was broken and the journey to breaking made this piece a very good read.

atrust• 11 years ago

Here is the English version of Copiale cipher in PDF:

http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-translation.pd...

MatthewTavares• 11 years ago

I found a few phase to phrase similarities between this and what appears to be an OCR scan of a free-mason manual: "Knee to knee", "foot to foot", etc.

https://archive.org/stream/ritualillustrati00allyuoft/ritual...

ChuckMcM3• 11 years ago

Reading this ... "Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state." makes me think they may come back in fashion.

Kinnard2• 11 years ago

How do you know they haven't already?

ChuckMcM3• 11 years ago

Very true, but one of the things that was clear in the article was that while the contents of the secret societies were secret, their existence was not.

superuser2• 11 years ago

Is there even the slightest bit of evidence that intellectuals in the Western world face state harassment or persecution for speaking or writing certain ideas?

For dumping classified information to which they have privileged access, yes. Not for expressing original opinions or commenting on published work.

For comparison, intellectuals in Iran are routinely detained without charge in Evin Prison for indefinite periods, tortured a bit, and told to stop writing. Straight out of East Germany. The U.S. is out of control in many ways, but this isn't one of them.

kragen2• 11 years ago

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providing_material_support_for... explains one law under which intellectuals in the US face state harassment and persecution for speaking and writing certain ideas; Tarek Mehanna, who is serving 17 years in prison for translating "propaganda" under this law, is probably the most cut-and-dried case.

But there are many other examples.

Of course, Aaron Swartz faced years of state harassment for his work on PACER, which was entirely legal, and was then hounded to suicide in a follow-on case for downloading academic articles.

Carl Malamud constantly answers baseless legal threats, and sometimes fights in court, in exchange for his continuing work of putting the law online.

TorrentFreak is regularly blocked by one or another Western government for their political advocacy against copyright.

US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was assassinated by the CIA for his political advocacy of terrorism against the US; his son, 16-year-old US citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who had no connection to terrorism, was assassinated by the CIA two weeks later.

US citizen Jacob Appelbaum, who has never had privileged access to any classified information, was harassed by the US government for years and is now living in exile in Berlin, due to his journalistic work.

US citizen Laura Poitras, who has never had privileged access to any classified information, was harassed by the US government for years and is now living in exile in Berlin, due to her award-winning documentary films and other journalistic work.

You're probably too young to remember when Jon Lech Johansen was arrested in Norway in 2002 for explaining how to decrypt the DVD copy protection scheme, and gag orders were imposed on periodicals in the US in an ultimately thwarted effort to "unpublish" Johansen's code. And you're probably too young to remember when Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested while visiting the US in 2001 for violating US law by writing Russian software in Russia for his Russian employer. And maybe you don't know about Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest, the only phone company that didn't cooperate with the NSA's illegal wiretapping program — which was then systematically destroyed, and Nacchio sent to prison for six years on trumped-up insider-trading charges.

And you probably don't care about people like US citizen Eric Garner, who was murdered on the street by a gang of policemen for speaking, to a policeman, the idea that he would really appreciate it if the state harassment of him would stop. I say you probably don't care because there's no reason to think he was an "intellectual". But non-intellectuals' lives matter, too, and so does their freedom of speech.

And maybe you hadn't heard that in Texas, ownership of laboratory glassware is now officially considered evidence of a crime — a truly medieval situation, criminalizing amateur chemistry because of the War On Some Drugs. You don't even have to speak or write about your chemistry research to get harassed and persecuted by the state for it. At least they don't burn the alchemists at the stake these days. Instead they send them to prison to be repeatedly raped.

But it's hard to believe you're so dumb you think this kind of thing really doesn't happen.

Speaking of those prisons — did you realize the US currently has 1% of its adult population in prison? And nearly 2% of its adult male population? And that this is a number almost unprecedented in human history, except for situations like the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge? * Communist-era East Germany couldn't hold a candle to that level of repression in quantitative terms. Iran, which has a terrible human rights record, has about a third the number of prisoners the US does. Your chances of going to jail without ever having committed a crime are a lot better in the US than in Iran. Unless you're white.

And this thing about how Iran tortures prisoners — I don't know if you missed it, but torture is the official policy both of the Bush administration and the Obama administration.

Do you really think there's no persecution for speaking certain ideas? What do you think would happen if you uploaded a Daesh beheading video to YouTube with your approving commentary?

* Situations like the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, and, much to my surprise, the current Seychelles Islands' War On Piracy. The kind with boats, not the kind where some jackass erases your birthday party video from YouTube because you didn't pay the royalty for Happy Birthday.

ablation• 11 years ago

A good read but a terrible headline (not here on YC, I mean the Wired page itself).

This trend of using third-person pronouns in article headlines is mildly annoying and feels like its come around as a result of this style of writing being popular on Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. It rankles my inner subeditor.

sam_goody• 11 years ago

The thread from the first time the article was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798145

Glad it was reposted, I was looking all over for this article recently, and "secret society" on Google doesn't get you anything useful ;)

Syi• 11 years ago

I realise this may sound very conspiracy theorist-y so please forgive that but does anyone else see a very strong relation to the Cicada 3301 organisation? The last two paragraphs especially made me think of the 3301 challenges released in the past few years.

"the mystical system in which meaning is derived from the numerical value of letters"...."symbols don’t represent just words and letters, they stand for numbers too"

I had a play about with the challenges when they were released and throughtout them were strange runes/ciphertext which could be both used as letters and numbers. I have done a fair few CTFs before but I have never seen anything like the Cicada challenges in terms of combining maths and language in such a way - how prominetly primes featured or how insanely well words and there numeric meaning seemed to align. The reason I immediately thought of them after reading the article is because I remember thinking while looking at the challenges that no one could come up with such an intricate and interconnected mathematical ciphertext system without some special (and as yet unknown/unpublished) "new way of calculating".

Not to mention all the secrecy around Cicada and the only rumors or supposed leaks from them suggest a secret organisation with a similar philosophy to the Oculists.

Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012)

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