Notes - Burdens of Proof - page 194

13. Kerckhoffs, “La cryptographie militaire,” 5 (my translation).
14. The Handbook of Applied Cryptography , the most important reference of the field,
explains in an opening note, “This topic only considers cryptography as it applies
to information in digital form,” providing references to encryption of analog signals,
physical security, and steganography, all security methods it considers to lie outside
modern cryptography proper. See Menezes, van Oorschot, and Vanstone, Handbook
of Applied Cryptography , 45-46. Neither Stinson's Cryptography , Brassard's Cryptologie
contemporaine , nor Simmons's Contemporary Cryptology mention it. This does not
mean that research on information hiding has not thrived—an international confer-
ence on the topic has taken place annually since 1996—but rather, that it has been
difficult to situate the contributions of the field within the dominant framework of
contemporary cryptography.
15. Fascination with computer-based information technologies has tended to
induce a global amnesia with regard to prior communication revolutions. In The
Cryptographic Imagination , Shawn Rosenheim suggests that in fact, the advent of the
telegraph (whose cultural legacy has remained underexamined) should be taken as
the crucial historical departure from which to examine the development of post-
modern identities. He argues all communication technologies created since—includ-
ing the transatlantic cable, the telephone, radio, television, and even the digital
computer—can be simply viewed as further elaborations of the telegraph's initial
premises. As the first electric telecommunications device, Morse's telegraph is the
significant point of rupture, severing the link between transportation and commu-
nication, separating bodies and information, and ushering an era where “the New-
tonian unities of being are replaced by the prosthetic extension of the self over a
network of wires.” Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination , 91. In a similar vein,
Laura Otis remarks that “what is new about networking is very little.” Laura Otis,
Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 221.
16. Kahn, The Codebreakers , 189.
17. Ibid., 190.
18. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph
and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers (New York: Walker and Co., 1998),
chapter 7.
19. Kahn, The Codebreakers , 190.
20. Ibid., 191.
21. Kerckhoffs, “La cryptographie militaire,” 12 (my translation).
22. He wrote with more than a tinge of exasperation: “I am astonished to see our
experts and professors teach and recommend for use in warfare, systems to which