Introduction - Burdens of Proof - page 12

and trivializing. Isabelle Stengers has pointed out how the delegitimation
of scientists' knowledge claims by sociologists is no less violent than that
performed, for example, by scientists when they seek to debunk the sup-
posed irrationality that drives the appreciation of scientific evidence by a
court of law. 28 Thus, I do not take the long-standing cryptographic contro-
versy over the meaning of “provable security” to signal some kind of
normative lapse, but rather as a symptom that after many years of reliable
service, certain disciplinary commitments are in need of attention and
revision. The persistent discrepancies between the breadth and depth
of cryptography's social ambitions and their actual realization would
seem more than ample justification for one such attempt at diagnosis
and revision.
Still, a nagging concern remains: after all, the state cannot be expected
to function without a stable framework for written evidence. As the birthers
controversy has highlighted, the legitimacy of l'état de droit fundamentally
depends on public faith in the origin and integrity of the documents that
signify the rule of law. Is there a point then in lifting the veil on the neces-
sarily messy circumstances of the birth of a new evidentiary paradigm?
One answer might be that this project is intellectually aligned with cryp-
tographers' critique of “security through obscurity,” an approach they have
forcefully decried as ultimately resulting in flawed security design. 29
Plan of the Topic
Chapter 2, “Communication in the Presence of Adversaries,” sets the stage
by providing a short overview of the history of cryptographic technologies,
periodized along successive “information ages.” 30 In each of these periods,
a dominant information and communication technology—paper, tele-
graph, radio, electromechanical computing, and networked computers—
drives the development of cryptographic techniques and devices. By
situating the development of these techniques within their social, institu-
tional, and material context, a picture emerges that highlights some often
unarticulated dimensions of the cryptographic experience, with important
implications for modern cryptographic design: how the embodiment of
cryptographic techniques in physical artifacts provides resources for defeat-
ing their security objectives; the logistical issues that have historically
plagued the large-scale deployment of cryptographic technologies, in par-