
Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012) - denzil_correa
http://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/
======
ChuckMcM
Reading this ... _" Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and
History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges
were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of
physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the
oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state."_ makes me think they may
come back in fashion.

~~~
superuser2
Is there even the slightest bit of evidence that intellectuals in the Western
world face state harassment or persecution for speaking or writing certain
ideas?

For dumping classified information to which they have privileged access, yes.
Not for expressing original opinions or commenting on published work.

For comparison, intellectuals in Iran are routinely detained without charge in
Evin Prison for indefinite periods, tortured a bit, and told to stop writing.
Straight out of East Germany. The U.S. is out of control in many ways, but
this isn't one of them.

~~~
kragen
Yes.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providing_material_support_for...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providing_material_support_for_terrorism)
explains one law under which intellectuals in the US face state harassment and
persecution for speaking and writing certain ideas; Tarek Mehanna, who is
serving 17 years in prison for translating "propaganda" under this law, is
probably the most cut-and-dried case.

But there are many other examples.

Of course, Aaron Swartz faced years of state harassment for his work on PACER,
which was entirely legal, and was then hounded to suicide in a follow-on case
for downloading academic articles.

Carl Malamud constantly answers baseless legal threats, and sometimes fights
in court, in exchange for his continuing work of putting the law online.

TorrentFreak is regularly blocked by one or another Western government for
their political advocacy against copyright.

US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was assassinated by the CIA for his political
advocacy of terrorism against the US; his son, 16-year-old US citizen
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who had no connection to terrorism, was assassinated by
the CIA two weeks later.

US citizen Jacob Appelbaum, who has never had privileged access to any
classified information, was harassed by the US government for years and is now
living in exile in Berlin, due to his journalistic work.

US citizen Laura Poitras, who has never had privileged access to any
classified information, was harassed by the US government for years and is now
living in exile in Berlin, due to her award-winning documentary films and
other journalistic work.

You're probably too young to remember when Jon Lech Johansen was arrested in
Norway in 2002 for explaining how to decrypt the DVD copy protection scheme,
and gag orders were imposed on periodicals in the US in an ultimately thwarted
effort to "unpublish" Johansen's code. And you're probably too young to
remember when Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested while visiting the US in 2001 for
violating US law by writing Russian software in Russia for his Russian
employer. And maybe you don't know about Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest, the
only phone company that didn't cooperate with the NSA's illegal wiretapping
program — which was then systematically destroyed, and Nacchio sent to prison
for six years on trumped-up insider-trading charges.

And you probably don't care about people like US citizen Eric Garner, who was
murdered on the street by a gang of policemen for speaking, to a policeman,
the idea that he would really appreciate it if the state harassment of him
would stop. I say you probably don't care because there's no reason to think
he was an "intellectual". But non-intellectuals' lives matter, too, and so
does their freedom of speech.

And maybe you hadn't heard that in Texas, ownership of laboratory glassware is
now officially considered evidence of a crime — a truly medieval situation,
criminalizing amateur chemistry because of the War On Some Drugs. You don't
even have to speak or write about your chemistry research to get harassed and
persecuted by the state for it. At least they don't burn the alchemists at the
stake these days. Instead they send them to prison to be repeatedly raped.

But it's hard to believe you're so dumb you think this kind of thing really
doesn't happen.

Speaking of those prisons — did you realize the US currently has 1% of its
adult population in prison? And nearly 2% of its adult male population? And
that this is a number almost unprecedented in human history, except for
situations like the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge? * Communist-era East
Germany couldn't hold a candle to that level of repression in quantitative
terms. Iran, which has a terrible human rights record, has about a third the
number of prisoners the US does. Your chances of going to jail without ever
having committed a crime are a lot better in the US than in Iran. Unless
you're white.

And this thing about how Iran tortures prisoners — I don't know if you missed
it, but torture is the official policy both of the Bush administration and the
Obama administration.

Do you really think there's no persecution for speaking certain ideas? What do
you think would happen if you uploaded a Daesh beheading video to YouTube with
your approving commentary?

* Situations like the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, and, much to my surprise, the current Seychelles Islands' War On Piracy. The kind with boats, not the kind where some jackass erases your birthday party video from YouTube because you didn't pay the royalty for Happy Birthday.

~~~
sanbor
Here in Argentina if you piss off somebody probably you will be found dead in
a suspicious way.

One of the most recent cases is the federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman[0], who
accused the president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, among other politicians
of exchanging alleged Iran terrorists for deals. Nisman was found dead in his
house a day before going to talk to the Congress about his findings.

Some other cases: Lourdes Di Natale, a key witness (it was the secretary of
Emir Yoma, a presidential advisor) in a case of the government illegally
selling weapons to Ecuador, "felt from her balcony" before going to testify.
Also, to erase evidence in the illegal arms case[1], they make to explode a
militar arms factory in Rio Cuarto, Córdoba, causing 7 deaths[2]. By the way,
only two people were found guilty of the whole investigation, one is the
former president Carlos Menem, but because he is currently a senator he can't
go to jail until the senate makes an special session to make that happen,
which is unlikely.

Julio Lopez, a witness that "disappeared" before testifying about how he was
disappeared and tortured during the last military government[3]. Probably this
time somebody finished the job.

And the assassins are almost never get a sentence because the justice is so
slow, inefficient and corrupt that very few cases are resolved. 21 years after
the AMIA attack (a car bombing of the Jewish center in Buenos Aires, which
killed 85 people[4]), they didn't find any guilty yet, and many evidence just
got destroyed because they leave it outside instead of keeping it safe.

Also, there are cases like José Luis Cabezas[5], a photographer that took one
of the few pictures of a gangster, was killed a year later taking that
picture, and because the people was extremely pissed off about that case, with
an obvious mafia touch, the justice moved fast and found the band contracted
to kill the photojournalist (one of them was a policeman and inspector), but
because our laws, almost all of the assassins are free today because legal
reason (one of them are was working as private security some years ago).

Let's also talk about the prison system in Argentina. In the mid-70s, because
jails were so populated, they had the idea that instead of having several
cells for prisoners, they could break the wall and have a hallway. That way it
is not so obvious how many prisoners they can put there. I'm not sure if "all
prisons in Argentina" are like this, but I read that the one in Villa Devoto
is like that[6].

Prisoners are not provided with clothes or beds, they sleep in mattresses in
the floor. Most of them are raped, and some get HIV.

So here we are at another level. Here there are no so many companies worried
about someone getting in their way of making money or military power going to
kill someone that their consider a threat.

Here the power is very concentrated in politicians and some few
businessmen/gangsters that are going to kill you if you get in their way. It
is not really about "free thinking", it's about "your idea/information is
going to affect my situation". Probably always has been like that.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Nisman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Nisman)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandal_over_Argentine_arms_sa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandal_over_Argentine_arms_sales_to_Ecuador_and_Croatia)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%ADo_Tercero_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%ADo_Tercero_explosion)
[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing)
[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Jorge_Julio_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Jorge_Julio_L%C3%B3pez)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Luis_Cabezas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Luis_Cabezas)
[6]
[http://www.pensamientopenal.com.ar/system/files/2015/05/doct...](http://www.pensamientopenal.com.ar/system/files/2015/05/doctrina41053.pdf)

------
sam_goody
The thread from the first time the article was posted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798145)

Glad it was reposted, I was looking all over for this article recently, and
"secret society" on Google doesn't get you anything useful ;)

------
Syi
I realise this may sound very conspiracy theorist-y so please forgive that but
does anyone else see a very strong relation to the Cicada 3301 organisation?
The last two paragraphs especially made me think of the 3301 challenges
released in the past few years.

"the mystical system in which meaning is derived from the numerical value of
letters"...."symbols don’t represent just words and letters, they stand for
numbers too"

I had a play about with the challenges when they were released and throughtout
them were strange runes/ciphertext which could be both used as letters and
numbers. I have done a fair few CTFs before but I have never seen anything
like the Cicada challenges in terms of combining maths and language in such a
way - how prominetly primes featured or how insanely well words and there
numeric meaning seemed to align. The reason I immediately thought of them
after reading the article is because I remember thinking while looking at the
challenges that no one could come up with such an intricate and interconnected
mathematical ciphertext system without some special (and as yet
unknown/unpublished) "new way of calculating".

Not to mention all the secrecy around Cicada and the only rumors or supposed
leaks from them suggest a secret organisation with a similar philosophy to the
Oculists.

------
Kinnard
One of the best pieces ever published in WIRED magazine.

~~~
joshbaptiste
Indeed.. the author breaks down in laymen terms how the cipher was broken and
the journey to breaking made this piece a very good read.

------
atrust
Here is the English version of Copiale cipher in PDF:

[http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-
translation.pd...](http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-
translation.pdf)

~~~
MatthewTavares
I found a few phase to phrase similarities between this and what appears to be
an OCR scan of a free-mason manual: "Knee to knee", "foot to foot", etc.

[https://archive.org/stream/ritualillustrati00allyuoft/ritual...](https://archive.org/stream/ritualillustrati00allyuoft/ritualillustrati00allyuoft_djvu.txt)

------
ablation
A good read but a terrible headline (not here on YC, I mean the Wired page
itself).

This trend of using third-person pronouns in article headlines is mildly
annoying and feels like its come around as a result of this style of writing
being popular on Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. It rankles my inner subeditor.

