13．Crypto 密码
Technology is a beauty. We eagerly adopt its pleasure, preferring to cope with the drawbacks on the morning after. Who can resist innovations like mobile phones and networked computers? They put anyone, anywhere, within earshot, and zip information— whether an expression of love, a medical chart or a plan for a product rollout— around the world in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for eavesdroppers to snap up those messages and conversations en route to their intended receiver. We think we’re whispering, but we’re broadcasting.
In this case, there’s an antidote: cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers to protect information. If you scramble information before it’s sent, eavesdroppers can’t hear what you say or read what you’re written. The good news is that, after decades of struggle against a government opposed to its widespread use, we’ve finally got access to crypto— software that does the scrambling, as well as other functions like “digital signatures” that will authenticate that we are who we say we are in cyberspace. You might not see the crypto, but it’s there, going into action every time your computer tells you it’s going into the secret “secure mode.” What should alarm you is that crypto still isn’t there — in the millions of medical records, credit-card databases. We can attribute that failure that failure to the government’s active opposition.
Nowadays, more and more of the activities once associated with that good old physical world will be performed at our keyboards, phone devices and palmtops and over digital televisions. Crypto lies at the center of this transition, and we’re going to ask a lot of it over the next few years. Will our e-mail and phone systems ever have strong encryption and digital signatures built in? Will feats of crypto really send “digital cash” to replace the paper money, and enable us to spend it in stores?
The issues in the crypto-battle, the first great war of the digital age, were more straightforward. As people cozied up to digital communications, and e-commerce became a force in the economy, the need for crypto’s near-magical power of encryption and authentication became red hot. But those at the helm of the government focused not on the benefits, but the dangers— the fear that terrorists or drug dealers would use this digital shield. Ultimately, the question boiled down to this: in an attempt to deny those dangerous few, were we all to be deprived of the tools of privacy?
责任编辑：虫虫
