The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

In the realm of publishing, there are many different genres and many different audiences for authors to appeal to. While books in the academic publishing world tend to be written by, and intended for, experts and students in the field, the realms of “pop” science, history, and other non-fiction genres aim at disseminating specialized knowledge to a more general audience. The Code Book is an example of the “pop” non-fiction phenomenon, as the author, Simon Singh, is an academic who has spent many years in the entertainment and media universe as well.

This book was written and published in the late 1990s, with the first edition published in 1999 and the revised edition appearing in 2000. From this perspective, the book reads as a good encapsulation of the way the topic was viewed at the turn of the millennium. On the one hand, there is a lot that the author gets right about the current state of affairs, as well as the predictions of the development moving in the direction of quantum mechanics and the increasing desire for the public to keep their information private. When personal computers began to enter homes in the 1980s, encryption was of concern to a very small minority of individuals. With computers becoming mainstream by the late 1990s, it began to be a more immediate concern for people wanting to send messages and participate in financial transactions over the internet.

The author deals with all of these various factors deftly, but in the years since the publication of the book, a whole new realm of digital communication and technology has been invented and adopted. The most obvious example is the ubiquity of the smartphone, a technology that the book does not even hint at. In this sense, however, the author’s intuition that privacy and encryption would become increasingly important to the average citizen was correct. Individuals now carry more information than could be known or used in a thousand lifetimes in their pockets, and people use their phones to buy groceries, apply for international Visas and passports, pay their rent, attend online classes, and an almost infinite number of other activities that require private information of all kinds to be kept private and secure.

Encryption is an absolutely essential aspect of keeping contemporary life moving seamlessly and securely, and it will likely never reverse course. Debates about when, why, and how much encryption should be used also continue unabated, especially regarding the borders between the private and public realms of life and how much sensitive data governments and corporations can collect on individuals.