Secret Diplomatic Message Deciphered After 350 Years

Spying was a profession 400 years ago due to the intense rivalry of France and England. Vast sums and amounts of time were spent on various schemes. Probably for revenge for losing western Europe in the 100 years war. Religion seems to have been mostly a cover for plunder and stealing treasure. France remained mostly Catholic, however the religious turnover in England created interesting dynamics.

The proprietor of Maryland landed the title Baron Baltimore through friendship with the spymaster to Queen Elizabeth, "whom Calvert had met during an extended trip to the European mainland between 1601 and 1603".

"He also held the title of Earl of Salisbury in 1605 and Lord High Treasurer in 1608, making him the most powerful man at the royal court."

The Calvert family lost the Maryland estate after the armed insurrection of 1689, however the Crown returned the estate to the Calvert family in 1715 "after Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, declared in public that he was a Protestant."

The final "23rd Governor of Restored Proprietary Government" Sir Robert Eden, 1st Baronet, was the great great grandfather of Prime Minister Anthony Eden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Calvert,_1st_Baron_Balt...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Maryland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Treaty_of_Dover

It was quite common to have a codebook that might list several numbers or words used to substitute for places, individuals, actions, etc.

These also existed for corporate entities. A concern might have their own codebook such that the telegraph office would not be privy to their internal business.

They would also use codebooks as a type of compression, since the telegraph company charged less for sending English words as opposed to enciphered characters, and obviously, there are many uncommon words that could substitute for longer common phrases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codebook

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...

If quantum computing would progress just like in the last 30 years it may take 300 years before it can be useful.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf

  As has been previously pointed out, the 2001 and 2012 quantum factorisation records may be easily matched with a dog trained to bark three times [33]. We verified this by taking a recently-calibrated reference dog, Scribble, depicted in Figure 6, and having him bark three times, thus simultaneously factorising both 15 and 21. This process wasn’t as simple as it first appeared because Scribble is very well behaved and almost never barks. Having him perform the quantum factorisation required having his owner play with him with a ball in order to encourage him to bark. It was a special performance just for this publication, because he understands the importance of evidence-based science.

What I want to know is how they guess which 0.001% of signals or internet traffic is actually worthwhile to keep? The biggest nation states could conceivably store about 1 year’s worth of internet traffic right now, but then they also need to store whatever other signals intelligence they’re gathering for analysis, so it will be less than a single years worth.

But almost all that data is going to turn out to be useless if or when they gain quantum ability to decrypt it, and even the stuff that could be useful now gets less useful with every month it stays encrypted. Stuff that is very useful intelligence now could be absolutely useless in five years…

This shouldn't be a major issue because of Forward Secrecy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy) principles built into modern TLS protocols, which ensure that even if the public/private key scheme is vulnerable to (for example) quantum attacks, the attacks have to be done now, as a MITM for the handshake, or otherwise the full traffic capture is useless for future decryption without getting some secrets from one of the endpoints.

That being said, it's not 100% used everywhere yet (Wikipedia mentions 92.6% of websites), and various means of tricking devices into downgrading to an older protocol would result in traffic that might be decrypted later.

It's an interesting little nugget of evidence in favor of the simulation hypothesis. We're currently living through the first era in humanity's history where there will be enough raw information to create a workable global level simulation once that data is decrypted. Pair that with the fact that we're living through such a huge inflection point in history (birth of the internet, humanity becoming a multiplanetary species, and more) and you have a time where people both (1) can and (2) will want to simulate/experience. It's quite interesting.

I'm still convinced that the simulation hypothesis is just religion for the atheist or agnostic, because if it turns out that it's correct and one day you 'wake up' only to find that it was all a simulation, well how do you know that isn't now also just another simulation? It's a non-theory. But I find this some quite compelling circumstantial evidence in favor of this non-theory. Because an arbitrary number of individuals may be able to experience "this" era throughout our species' future, yet only one group will be the one that gets to actually live it, and that group will ostensibly be orders of magnitude smaller than the sum total of all that will later 'experience' it. Statistically you're rather more likely to belong to the simulation group than the real, if these assumptions are correct.

Sat in a similar briefing in 2018, sounds like the same talking points still.

I don't think this is true at anything resembling a concerning scale.

Even trying to do something like saving 'just' the average yearly traffic tor handles would account for 2-3% of all the current storage available.

We're talking about the same government that quickly abandoned their quest of 'archiving every tweet in the Library of Congress'

Different Satoshi.

Not a cryptologist, not cryptology.

Do you have a link to your codes letter available online?