Code War

The Man Who Never Was, Das Boot, and Guadalcanal Diary. And his scenes are populated with characters who could just as easily have stepped out of P.G. Wodehouse as out of James Jones, with guest appearances by real-world figures such as Alan Turing, Ronald Reagan, and Douglas MacArthur. There's even a set piece about the death of Admiral Yamamoto that could stand alone as a short story.

The result is a book that is readable, funny, humane, literary, and technically sophisticated (in every sense). But as I suggested at the outset, it is far more than a good read. It is vitally engaged with debates central to a world in which access to and control of information, data, and messaging is increasingly important. Stephenson forces readers to see cryptography (the creation of ciphertexts) and cryptanalysis (the decoding of such texts)--as something that's not only comprehensible by ordinary people but also something that each of us is, in some sense, born to do. To that end, he quotes Alan Turing, England's master codebreaker and the father of modern computing, at the very beginning of the book: "There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have yet to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily."

In short, the task of making sense of the universe--a task that, on some level or other, is one that each of us must face--is very much like a decoding problem. We have to figure out what is meaningful or true based on the inherently limited and untrustworthy evidence that the real world provides. And one finds this theme sounded again and again--especially when one of the Waterhouse males has to deal with the opposite sex (which turns out to be a very special kind of cryptanalytic problem for each of them). This idea applies even to the novel's title: In the book's fictive world, Cryptonomicon is the name given to a collection of scholarly works, compiled over centuries, that focus on the problems of cryptanalysis. In an analogous way, Stephenson's novel is itself a collection of individual stories that each provide a way into understanding the larger story of the crucial role that cryptology has played in shaping the culture we live in now.

That role is underscored early in the novel when Lawrence Waterhouse first joins the cryptanalytic team at England's Bletchley Park: "Some information comes into Waterhouse's eyes at least: on the other side of that window, men are gathered around a machine. Most of them are wearing civilian clothes, and they have been too busy, for too long, to trifle much with combs and razors and shoe polish. The men are intensely focused upon their work, which all has to do with this large machine. The machine consists of a large framework of square steel tubing, like a bedstead set up on one end. Metal drums with the diameter of dinner plates, an inch or so thick, are mounted at several locations on this framework. Paper tape has been threaded into a bewilderingly loopy trajectory from drum to drum. It looks as if a dozen yards of tape are required to thread the machine."

This is it in a nutshell: The confluence of the beginnings of modern decoding, computing, and disheveled hacker culture--it's a short step from Bletchley Park to the personal computer, now a fixture of everyday life in the industrialized world. And from PCs it's a short step back to cryptology, since cheap computing makes it possible for everyone to do cryptography more crack-proof than the most powerful encryption that governments could do half a century ago. This is, of course, a development that has troubled governments everywhere, and the United States government in particular. Thanks to some pioneering work done by American cryptographers only a couple of decades ago, the knowledge and techniques necessary for encoding or scrambling the things you write or say are no longer the sole preserve of government intelligence agencies; in fact, they are easily reproduced and implemented and available at low prices to most Americans today.

In a world full of governments that have grown accustomed--even comfortable--in their ability to keep track of their citizens, and to gather evidence about them when necessary, these developments are disorienting. What happens in a world where one cannot guarantee that a working wiretap will recover anything useful because the message traffic on the phone in question is encrypted? What happens when the perpetrator of a criminal threat can easily disappear from an online environment because no one has the information necessary to track or identify him? The question raised by the subplot of Cryptonomicon set in 1999 is even more troubling: What happens when you establish a monetary system that does not depend on government and that does not lend itself easily to government tracking and supervision? (The novel's short answer is large-scale money laundering, among other things--no wonder the international criminal underworld evinces a deep interest in Randy Waterhouse's "data haven" project.)

For these reasons, our real-world government has been fighting a war against the spread of cryptographic tools. That war has been largely unpublicized, in part because the general public has yet to deem cryptography policy a matter of central concern. There is no groundswell of public support for keeping encryption technologies available to everybody, nor any anti-encryption-control group the equivalent of the National Rifle Association. Civil-liberties groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the ACLU are fighting the Department of Justice and the National Security Agency over this issue, but it's a pretty lonely fight. The U.S. government has been sufficiently successful in suppressing the spread of encryption technologies both at home and abroad that the kinds of protections we should have--such as transparent encoding and decoding of e-mail in transmission or truly secure cell phones--are still in the future for most of us.

Why have civil libertarians so often found cryptography issues a tough sell? The problem is that for most people the subject seems awfully esoteric--codes and ciphers are what spies do, and are out of the range of concerns for ordinary people. Cryptonomicon challenges that notion by demonstrating in countless contexts not only how good human beings are at decoding and encoding their environments but also how instinctive that process is. We can't help functioning as cryptographers and cryptoanalysts because, at bottom, that is what we as human beings do. Which means that our government's current obsession with suppressing the spread of cryptographic information and tools is really a kind of suppression of human nature--and history tells us that any such effort at suppressing something that everybody does is invariably futile over the long run.

Will Cryptonomicon turn the tide of public opinion about cryptography or inform the political will to challenge the government's anti-cryptography policies? On the one hand, it's hard to believe that a 900-page novel of any sort could change the political landscape in an era in which the novel is an increasingly marginal mass- media form. Still, this book is compulsively readable, and word of how good it is has flooded throughout the Internet and into our literary culture. Cryptonomicon has already found its way onto The New York Times bestseller list (it made it to Amazon's top 100 even before publication). Whether the book will help trigger a sea change in the cultural dialogue about cryptological issues remains to be seen, but I for one am pretty hopeful about the prospect.