The Founding Fathers actually took personal accountability with their comms privacy. They were all [justifiably] paranoid that postmasters and others would intercept their messages. These pioneers continue to put modern day girlie-man politicians, with their fake e-mails and nudie picture hacking, to shame.
I was surfing around to learn more about steganography, nomenclators, and ciphers (for blockchain data holding applications). I stumbled upon this little gem in the Library of Congress. I knew Jefferson and Franklin dabbled in ciphers & cryptography, but had never heard of James Madison's (father of the constitution) penchant for code.
This is funny to read in the
prism of our current US privacy debate.
From Lib of Congress:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/madison_papers/mjmciphers.html"As a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, while secretary of state, and in his personal correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison feared constantly that unauthorized people would seek to read his private and public correspondence. To deter such intrusions, he resorted to a variety of codes and ciphers…
"Like others, Madison often tired of using the time-consuming Lovell ciphers. As a result, he and Randolph tried to circumvent the codes with a secret seal…
"In his correspondence with James Monroe, a fellow Virginia delegate and another future president, Madison used a major 600-element nomenclator. A nomenclator is a list with numbers keyed to the same number of words or parts of words (elements) in a random pattern and then used as their substitutes in an encoded message. Madison thought that such a code "will answer every purpose"…
"Madison and Jefferson regularly used a 1,700-element nomenclator called "Jefferson's Third Cypher." As Madison wrote to Jefferson on October 17, 1784, "My two last neither of which were in cypher were written as will be all future ones in the same situation, in expectation of their being read by the postmasters. I am well assured that this is the fate of all the other Countries of Europe. Having now the use of my cypher I can write without restraint.
"When Jefferson returned from France, he and Madison abandoned their ciphers until the heated political animosities of the 1790s led them to resume the use of the one devised in 1785. (See, for example, Jefferson to Madison, August 11 and 18, 1793.) Fearing that their letters would be read by postmasters of the opposing Federalist Party, they relied on private conversations for most of their political discussions, left letters unsigned, and began to encipher their letters when forced to put pen to paper about a potentially embarrassing or controversial topic."
