
The world's first hack: the telegraph and the invention of privacy (2015) - bookofjoe
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/15/first-hack-telegraph-invention-privacy-gchq-nsa
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lucas_membrane
The article misses quite a bit of the real story. Codes came to telegraphy
both for reasons of privacy and for reasons of economy. The story in the US is
about like this: The price of a telegraph message was based on the number of
words, mostly a certain number of cents per word. For businesses that
communicated regularly with a regular set of sales and purchasing agents
(either traveling or fixed) in remote cities, the telegraph expense was
sufficient for them to adopt communication by code words that could shorten
their messages considerably. Two implications of this were obvious. First, the
telegraph customers realized that because they were encoding and decoding
their messages anyway, they could obtain privacy with little extra expense by
going to 100% ciphered messages and securing their codebooks. Second, the
telegraph companies realized that they were losing revenues and worked out a
new rate structure for coded messages. The use of 5-letter groups as code
words developed in this period because the telegraph companies figured that a
word was (on average) five letters, and they did not want to would lose
revenue if they charged per word for messages with longer code words. The
hackers still found ways to hack the system. For example, before the age of
government-issued IDs, a stranger (from out of town) could go into a telegraph
office and send a telegram over the signature of any other similarly unknown
out-of-towner.

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frosted-flakes
If anyone's interested in learning more about the history of the telegraph, I
recommend reading The _Victorian Internet_ by Tom Standage[1]. It's an
approachable and fairly short book (200 pages) that tells the stories of all
of the people involved with it.

If you want to know what it was like to be a telegraph operator, check out
this cheesy 19th century novel about a romance that develops over the
telegraph, called _Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and dashes_ [2]. I don't know
how accurate it is, but it was certainly entertaining.

[1] [https://www.kobo.com/CA/en/ebook/the-victorian-
internet-1](https://www.kobo.com/CA/en/ebook/the-victorian-internet-1)

[2]
[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24353](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24353)

