NYT on Crypto Bills

[Peter Wayner]

>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.