On Mar 4, 3:09pm, Adam Shostack wrote:

...

Markoff shouyld know better than this. There is a long history of business use of codes & ciphers, going back hundereds of years, and durring the heyday of the telegraph, there were fair size companies that created codebooks with (locally configurable) superencipherment systems for the market.

I thought that, for the most part, the telegraph systems described above were to reduce cable charges (1 code word instead of a 15-word sentence, a huge savings in those days). Maybe it's the use to which the encoding's put that's controversial, not the (idea of) encoding itself.

Yes, this is true, but the government still spent plenty of time getting a library of the standard libraries of commercial codes. There are books and books about these codes. Naturally, some were more oriented toward secrecy. Others were just so obscure that you needed the code dictionary to understand them.