Hahahaha!! This is paywalled but it takes a few seconds to apply, and I managed to get it into reader mode before then. Whooo! Hooray for slow Javascript.
Huh, this story came to the author via John Graham-Cummings, who you might know as the CTO of Cloudflare (booo) but who is also the guy who led the campaign to apologise to Alan Turing?? He also did a bunch of other things. Huh.
So, Tim Jenkin grew up a regular racist white South African, but travel abroad let him access non-censored media, and he learned how oppressive South Africa was. In 1974 he offered to help the ANC, and became an engaged activist distributing pamphlets. He liked to make leaflet bombs, which shot leaflets into the wind, to be distributed thusly. In 1978, he got caught and was sentenced to 12 years.
Him and two colleagues escaped from prison in a very clever scheme, involved making duplicate keys in the carpentry workshop. Eventually got to London.
The ANCs main problem in the 1980s was secure communications between the exiled leaders and the activists on the ground (okay, you could also solve this problem by not having leaders, but nevermind that - you still need comms to do any sort of getting people in/out).
Suspicious of pre-existing implementations, Jenkin set about developing a system on laughably underpowered technology. The way it worked was thusly: 1. Activist writes a message on a computer and encrypts it with a floppy disc containing a one-time pad of random numbers. 2. The encrypted message is transformed into audio and transmitted via telephone and “modems with acoustic couplers” (not sure what that means). 3. The message could be decrypted with the correct one-time pad.
Issues are getting computers to the activists, and getting them the copies of one-time pads (because you have to use the right pad for the right message, and this has to be agreed in advance (so is usually systematic somehow)).
This was accomplished via a sympathetic Dutch flight attendent who routinely flew to Pretoria and delivered them the package(s).
The system worked brilliantly! And the ANC could smuggle some leaders back into the country. It even allowed exiled senior leaders to contact the incarcerated Nelson Mandela, by hiding the decrypted messages in secret compartments in books.
Damn, this is classic spycraft.
This system was really effective, and useful to the ANC. Yay :)
Graham-Cumming enters the story because he got in touch with Jenkin to ask what happened next (Jenkin just had a normal life like, and they made a film about the prison break). Jenkin encrypted his software to bring it back into the country, and eventually forgot the password. Whoops.
Graham-Cumming managed to decrypt the file, which is cool, and run it on an emulator.
Jenkin worked as a computer programmer and web designer, subsequently, and uploaded the code to GitHub, eventually along with some messages that were sent with it.
This is really cool! Because the shiny tech was practical and useful on the ground. If only we could all be so lucky with the things we make.
My takeaways:
- Very cool!!!!
- Practical and useful
- Antifascist