The Cryptographic Imagination

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Colleg

Incorporating Critical Thinking Skills Into the Language Arts Curriculum, Particularly in the Field of Detective Fiction

In this age of accelerated change and continuing complexity, there is a widely-recognized need to incorporate critical thinking skills into all aspects of everyday life and not simply as an optional philosophy class at the post-secondary level of American education. Chapter One of this culminating project investigates the historical roots of critical thinking, with a brief investigation into the history of bow education in America (with slight digressions such as Alcott/Emerson\u27s Temple School and John Dewey\u27s Chicago experiments) has historically failed to foster the development of critical thinking skills in America\u27s students by its centuries old tradition of emphasizing rote memorization, passive learning, and social indoctrination. Chapter Two discusses how the realization of the importance of critical thinking skills has affected teacher education programs and has rekindled debates regarding the content versus process approach to including critical thinking skills in the curriculum. This chapter also investigates the current renaissance regarding wait-time and the importance of cooperative learning in the classroom. Echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson\u27s :sentiments regarding education, Chapter Three discusses techniques to foster creative and critical reading skills in the high school student as well as critical thinking skills. Included in this chapter are lateral thinking puzzles, word games, and exercises to stimulate critical thinking. Chapter Four investigates the application of critical thinking exercises into a discussion of one of the most popular literary genres, detective fiction. This chapter also provides a transcript of the actual implementation of this approach in a Detective Fiction class at Saint Francis Borgia Regional High School in Washington, Missouri. Chapter Five reiterates the guiding principles of the Center for Critical Thinking and Moral Critique and how they apply to the inclusion of critical thinking skills into the language arts curriculum, specifically in the field of detective fiction

Law and Policy for the Quantum Age

Law and Policy for the Quantum Age is for readers interested in the political and business strategies underlying quantum sensing, computing, and communication. This work explains how these quantum technologies work, future national defense and legal landscapes for nations interested in strategic advantage, and paths to profit for companies

An adaptive cryptosystem on a Finite Field

Owing to mathematical theory and computational power evolution, modern cryptosystems demand ingenious trapdoor functions as their foundation to extend the gap between an enthusiastic interceptor and sensitive information. This paper introduces an adaptive block encryption scheme. This system is based on product, exponent, and modulo operation on a finite field. At the heart of this algorithm lies an innovative and robust trapdoor function that operates in the Galois Field and is responsible for the superior speed and security offered by it. Prime number theorem plays a fundamental role in this system, to keep unwelcome adversaries at bay. This is a self-adjusting cryptosystem that autonomously optimizes the system parameters thereby reducing effort on the user\u27s side while enhancing the level of security. This paper provides an extensive analysis of a few notable attributes of this cryptosystem such as its exponential rise in security with an increase in the length of plaintext while simultaneously ensuring that the operations are carried out in feasible runtime. Additionally, an experimental analysis is also performed to study the trends and relations between the cryptosystem parameters, including a few edge cases

Furtive Encryption: Power, Trusts, and the Constitutional Cost of Collective Surveillance

Recent revelations of heretofore secret U.S. government surveillance programs have sparked national conversations about their constitutionality and the delicate balance between security and civil liberties in a constitutional democracy. Among the revealed policies asserted by the National Security Agency (NSA) is a provision found in the “minimization procedures” required under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. This provision allows the NSA to collect and keep indefinitely any encrypted information collected from domestic communications—including the communications of U.S. citizens. That is, according to the U.S. government, the mere fact that a U.S. citizen has encrypted her electronic communications is enough to give the NSA the right to store that data until it is able to decrypt or decode it. Through this provision, the NSA is automatically treating all electronic communications from U.S. citizens that are hidden or obscured through encryption—for whatever reason—as suspicious, a direct descendant of the “nothing-to-hide” family of privacy minimization arguments. The ubiquity of electronic communication in the United States and elsewhere has led to the widespread use of encryption, the vast majority of it for innocuous purposes. This Article argues that the mere encryption by individuals of their electronic communications is not alone a basis for individualized suspicion. Moreover, this Article asserts that the NSA’s policy amounts to a suspicionless search and seizure. This program is therefore in direct conflict with the fundamental principles underlying the Fourth Amendment, specifically the protection of individuals from unwarranted government power and the establishment of the reciprocal trust between citizen and government that is necessary for a healthy democracy

The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography

This dissertation examines the origins of political and scientific commitments that currently frame cryptography, the study of secret codes, arguing that these commitments took shape over the course of the twentieth century. Looking back to the nineteenth century, cryptography was rarely practiced systematically, let alone scientifically, nor was it the contentious political subject it has become in the digital age. Beginning with the rise of computational cryptography in the first half of the twentieth century, this history identifies a quarter-century gap beginning in the late 1940s, when cryptography research was classified and tightly controlled in the US. Observing the reemergence of open research in cryptography in the early 1970s, a course of events that was directly opposed by many members of the US intelligence community, a wave of political scandals unrelated to cryptography during the Nixon years also made the secrecy surrounding cryptography appear untenable, weakening the official capacity to enforce this classification. Today, the subject of cryptography remains highly political and adversarial, with many proponents gripped by the conviction that widespread access to strong cryptography is necessary for a free society in the digital age, while opponents contend that strong cryptography in fact presents a danger to society and the rule of law. I argue that cryptography would not have become invested with these deep political commitments if it had not been suppressed in research and the media during the postwar years. The greater the force exerted to dissuade writers and scientists from studying cryptography, the more the subject became wrapped in an aura of civil disobedience and public need. These positive political investments in cryptography have since become widely accepted among many civil libertarians, transparency activists, journalists, and computer scientists who treat cryptography as an essential instrument for maintaining a free and open society in the digital age. Likewise, even as opponents of widespread access to strong cryptography have conceded considerable ground in recent decades, their opposition is grounded in many of the same principles that defined their stance during cryptography’s public reemergence in the 1970s. Studying this critical historical moment reveals not only the origins of cryptography’s current politics, but also the political origins of modern cryptography

Continuous, not discrete: The mutual influence of digital and physical literature

The use of computational methods to develop innovative forms of storytelling and poetry has gained traction since the late 1980s. At the same time, legacy publishing has largely migrated to using digital workflows. Despite the possibility for crossover, the electronic literature community has generally defined their practice in opposition to print and traditional publishing practices more generally. Not only does this ignore a range of hybrid forms, but it also limits non-digital literature to print, rather than considering a range of physical literatures. In this article, I argue that it is more productive to consider physical and digital literature as convergent forms as both a historicizing process, and a way of identifying innovations. Case studies of William Gibson et al’s Agrippa (a book of the dead) and Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Project’s playful use of innovations in genetics demonstrate the productive tensions in the convergence between digital and physical literature