If you’ve ever had to change all your online passwords due to a data leak on some app you barely remember using, you have some idea of the importance and ubiquity of cryptography in our modern world. We all value our privacy, and in the information age that means shielding ourselves from online attack and exploitation through the use of sophisticated codes and ciphers – that’s cryptography in a nutshell.
But sometimes it’s not just our Netflix log-in or even our bank accounts at risk; sometimes it’s lives, nations and countless billions of dollars on the line. Cracking the Code is all about those moments, taking us on a fascinating journey through the history of cryptography, but also drawing connections between these high-stakes contests of tradecraft and our own experiences.
If, in times of war, we can view cryptography as a battlefield, then it’s one populated by the most unexpected heroes. One that we meet in the first episode, ‘The Mob Code’, is Elizebeth Friedman, a suburban housewife who was instrumental in U.S. cryptography not only in World War I and World War II, but in the war against bootleggers like Al Capone that happened between them.
Stone tablets found on Crete in 1900 defied academics and code-crackers for 50 years. As seen in the episode titled ‘The Lost Civilisation’. Source: Blink Films
Friedman got her start in code-cracking trying to prove that Sir Francis Bacon had actually written Shakespeare’s plays (spoiler: he did not) and proved so adept at trying to parse the supposed hidden messages in the plays that she became a sought-after code-cracker, working for the Coast Guard to break the codes used by smugglers bringing alcohol and narcotics into the country. She was also a work-from-home pioneer, successfully arguing that, as the mother of young children, she could wrangle codes at home as easily as in an office.
Decades later, it would be a couple of crossword enthusiasts, Donald and Bettye Harden, who would first crack the cipher sent to San Francisco newspapers by the notorious Zodiac Killer, the still-unidentified serial murderer who terrorised California in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. It’s funny how the big names in cryptography are often just bored people with too much time on their hands.
Historian Dr Sasha Auerbach from the University of Nottingham is one of the experts interviewed in ‘Cracking The Code’. Source: Blink Films
As the second episode, ‘The Killer Code’, explains, the Zodiac Killer revelled in sending both taunting letters and fiendishly difficult cryptograms to the media and the authorities, and while the Hardens broke one of his ciphers in a mere seven days, only one other of the four in total he sent has ever been cracked – and that as recently as 2020.
Sometimes the entire crimefighting apparatus of several nations come into play, as in episode 5, ‘The Gang Code’. After UK police picked up criminal Mark Fellowes for the suspected murders of Paul Massey and John Kinsella, they were surprised to find his mobile phone completely wiped.
Fellowes was found to have been using an Encrochat handset – a specially modified Android phone that not only offered end-to-end encryption, but a kind of dead-man switch that would wipe all data in an emergency (such as being arrested).
Effectively, Encrochat was a kind of Facebook for gangsters, and breaking into the heavily protected network required a combined effort by Dutch and French law enforcement bodies.
From the episode, ‘The Gang Code’. Source: Blink Films
Other episodes dive into human DNA, attempts to decipher a mysterious long-lost language and how codebreakers uncovered a Soviet spy ring in the US government.
Like a complex code, the subject of cryptography gets more fascinating the deeper you dive. Cracking the Code, then, allows us to test the waters a little, giving us an easy, fun way into this arcane world of numbers, codices, criminals and codebreakers. And perhaps we’ll think a bit harder the next time the prompt to choose a password pops up on our screens.
Cracking The Code is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
