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We definetly hit the ground running this term. We haven’t even been back a week before we have to do another blog post.
We started a new unit all about Disruption. Now the word Disruption can mean a lot of things. It can mean a revolution, it can mean change, it can mean chaos.
Now although Disruption is a broad term this unit has a narrower focus. We are going to be looking at how technology has been a Disruption. How it has grown and changed over the course of a few years and how that has influenced society and how it functions today.
To start off the unit we were tasked with reading a book over the break. It’s called Little Brother. The whole idea of the book is technology being used to create disruption or a huge disturbance in a large city.
It takes place in San Francisco after a huge terrorist attack and a teenager is falsely accused and treated horribly by the government.
Now after reading the book we have been tasked with a research project looking at some of the references made in the book. I, being the WW2 nerd I am, chose the Enigma Machine.
Now if you if you haven’t heard of the Enigma machine before I will explain it to you.
A few years after WW1 a German engineer, by the name of Arthur Scherbius, created a machine that would encrypt and decrypt messages. The main purpose was for Germany and its military but it was also sold commercially to other countries and private companies. It was taken off the market when Nazi Germany became a thing. All of the German military branches used the machine for their messages. Each branch had a slightly different machine to provide a bit of a variety in the encoding capabilities and to make more secret and important branches harder to break. The design of the original model was three rotors that could be changed to every letter in the alphabet with two keyboards one where you could type and the other would light up letters when they were being decrypted or encrypted. Some of the later models also had a plug system where you could pair two letters and they would swap every decode and encode step. This created an even more complex cypher. It was shaped similar to a typewriter and folded up to look similar to a suitcase.
The way to encrypt a tranmission was pretty straight forward. You would pick three random letters. Then you enter in another set of three letters and get a encoded version of those three letters after that you decode your transmission. When you send it you send the first set of letters and then the encoded three letters. The receiver would just enter in the first three letters into the rotors and then decrypt the encoded three letters to get the official message key to decrypt the rest of the transmission.
It might seem seem confusing but it worked.
Enigma was one of the few things that truely prolonged the war. It took at least half of the war for the Allies to be able to crack the codes in time for plans to be thwarted.
It was first considered cracked when a polish team devised a machine that could decrypt the text but this was before the Nazis decided to conquer the country. When Poland was under threat the team gave all of the information they had to the Allies and more specifically the British.
Have you ever heard of Bletchley Park?
Have you ever heard of Hut 8?
Those two names are the biggest names in the history of Enigma and are apart of the biggest names of the British War Contribution.
Bletchley Park was a place in England near the town of Bletchley. It was a restricted area to the public until just a few decades ago. There was a building on the campus called Hut 8. This building housed, in my mind, the most important information of the war and the way to end the war. Inside Hut 8, mathematicians and codebreakers worked everyday on cracking the “unbreakable” Enigma code.
In Hut 8 there was a man.
His name was Alan Turing.
He cracked Enigma.
Now he didn’t necessarily crack it he created one of the first computers that was able to decode the messages much faster than thought possible. He created a way to decode the enigma messages so fast that the information gathered gave victory to the Allies. He saved approximately 14 million lives and shortened the war by two years.
Although it made the deciphering faster, Turing still wasn’t content. He spent the rest of the war creating and implementing another code breaking strategy, not a computer, that was able to crack the much more complex, naval enigma. (The naval enigma machine had 8 rotors by the mid point of the war)
How does this all relate to the book I mentioned earlier? In a passage from Little Brother. The main character, Marcus, gets into the world of cyphers and he explains how Governments used to have departments that worked on developing its cyphers and also try to crack other countries codes. Nowadays everyone has the ability to create a cypher but there will always be someone smarter than you who can crack it. This is the same case for Enigma. It did take a few years but people were able to crack it.
As I said earlier Disruption is change and the Enigma Machine was the cause for huge advancements in computers. Without enigma, computers might have come much later. Although it is strange to think about it but without the great threat of a box with a typewriter-like machine inside we might not have the kind of technology we have today. It also seems strange to think that because of Nazi Germany we have computers like we do.
Bibliography:
– Enigma