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The Science of Secrecy
  The Babington Plot   Hieroglyphs   Le chiffre indéchiffrable   The Zimmermann telegram   Going public
  The Babington Plot   Hieroglyphs   Le chiffre indéchiffrable   The Zimmerman telegram   Going public
 

Ever since humans began writing, they have been writing in code, and these codes have decided the fates of empires. In The Science of Secrecy Simon Singh traced the evolution of methods of encryption and revealed the dramatic effects of codes on wars, nations, and individual lives. As we enter the Information Age, encryption is becoming more and more important to all of us, and the series also looked at issues of online security and asked if there are lessons we can learn from the past.

  • The Babington plot - Mary Queen of Scots, treason and the substitution cipher.

  • Hieroglyphs - The cracking of the hieroglyphic code, the key to the ancient Egyptian civilisation.

  • Le chiffre indéchiffrable - How the Vigenère cipher, the 'indecipherable cipher', was cracked.

  • The Zimmermann telegram - Deciphering this telegram from the German foreign minister was the most important episode in the history of wartime cryptography. Pages loaded with this programme include the story of the cracking of the Enigma code during the Second World War.

  • Going public - public-key cryptography and security on the internet.

  • Chat with Simon Singh - Read Simon's answers to your questions about codes and code-breaking.

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