VIEWPOINT.

The article focuses on the viewpoints of the author about the cryptography. Cryptography-secret writing is only slightly younger than writing itself. While there has been a public interest to preserve, there has not been any official public policy recently. For 75 years the U.S. government has had a secret policy of sorts about the use of cryptography. Because the policy is secret, it cannot be known with any certainty. That is, it is to be reserved for the purposes of, first and foremost, intelligence gathering, and second, protecting the secret communications of the government. Both the history of the century and that of cryptography are inextricably bound to that of information technology in general and the computer in particular. The growth of government power and the advent of radio telegraphy brought a huge increase in communication traffic that required secret codes to secure it. Cryptographic software, easily replicated, has the capacity to turn any and every microcomputer into an encoding machine more powerful than the specially designed machines used in World War II.