Crypto books

[David Honig]

At 04:03 PM 1/10/01 -0500, Tim May wrote:
>Very few current books actually are _important_. 

I've found the following two books to be good reading and
even appropriate to this list: The Irish War, Tony Geraghty (c) 2000;
and The Story of Magic by Frank Rowlett (c) 1998.  

_Magic_ is about the career of a high school math teacher who
got into crypto under Friedman, before computers.  He eventually used them,
and there is much discussion about hilariously archaic IBM equiptment,
tabulator plugboards, relay circuit design, a whole chapter devoted to
building a device that performed autoindexed addressing (without the IBM
dudes knowing about it... you're not supposed to hack on the rented stuff..)
They were tossing hollerith cards in front of fans to generate
randomness.  They end up reverse engineering and duplicating a Japanese
cipher machine without plans. 

The book, written from Rowlett's perspective, reads pretty well, 
better than Kahn.  Rowlett describes some of the methods of attack, both
pencil and paper and punched-cards; the punch card operations & recipes are
fascinating to read about and try to figure out the modern equivalent.
It is hard to imagine the tedium that was involved in old cryptanalysis.

Obviously you get more out of the book the more you can relate to
the problems he faced -perfect for readers here.  



_Irish War_ is about the past and present north irish independence 
movement.  Its pretty fascinating reading about how the IRA and
British continually refined their practices and tools.  There's some
tech meat about surveillance, running a network, and homemade
military tech.  The IRA had metalshops to make their own weapons and
propellants and explosives, and had made their own recoilless rocket 
and HEAT warheads.  You get the same sense of intricately fucked historical
hatreds that you do if you read a brief history of yugoslavia.

You learn that the Brit SS set up a clothing cleaning service (p 90)
and ran forensic analysis on the collected clothes before cleaning.
Shades of the FBI's covert house cleaning service...or Boris's computer
repair shop.  

As a result of the War, North Ireland is set up like a demo room
for Louie Freeh's wet dreams.  This book might be 'important' for
documenting that.