I
thought I would emerge from my application hibernation to write about something
everyone who reads my blog has to check out. One of my sources (a very kind
colleague) has informed me of a new exhibit at the Folger. Bill Sherman, a curator at
the Folger Shakespeare Library, has put together an exhibit called Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes
and Ciphers. Awesome. Or, as Sherman says here of William Friedman’s
encoded drawing of a flower, it is “mind-blowingly clever, and fun.” This exhibit
is a testament to not only the widespread use of cryptography in the Renaissance
but also to our own age’s increased awareness of and fascination with the world
of the clandestine services. Of particular interest to me is the unusually firm
connection between Renaissance methods of encoding and our own. While Sherman is
surprised by the fact that “Renaissance principles of cryptography are still
its guiding principles in the 20th century,” I have been finding
this in my research for a few years now. Even in the shift to dataveillance,
the underlying assumptions and modus
operandi remain the same: attaining total knowledge through covert methods
of acquisition. Although they are backing off this claim now, the NSA and GCHQ asserted
that they sought to “own” and “master” the internet in the years following 2001.
After all, humans are still needed to parse and interpret the intelligence
provided by machines. Rather than rendering humans obsolete, dataveillance only
intensifies their work and shines a new light on age-old questions about the epistemological
underpinnings of surveillance.
I even
learned from another source, who shall remain nameless (actually a renowned
scholar in the field of Renaissance literature), that a former student of hers
(or his) was a retired government operative who chose to do a paper on
surveillance in the worlds of Hamlet,
Shakespeare, and modern America. With firsthand knowledge of contemporary
practices in counterespionage, this student was well-suited to compare
Walsingham’s tactics with those of this age, and the conclusion was that almost
nothing had changed. The tactics and overarching strategies that this student experienced
as a secret agent were actually quite similar to those narrated in the
biographies on Walsingham—which are flourishing now, by the way. Even though
the life of Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster always makes for a good, marketable book,
biographies of the father of English counterintelligence have mushroomed since
2001. This is in addition to the fictional “Kit Marlowe” and “Ursula Blanchard”
mysteries and the “Spymaster Chronicles.” Since 2005 there have been five different
biographies on Walsingham in English and more in other languages. It is a sign
of the times—and now it has come to the Folger. This stuff is really important because we as a nation are trying to process what all this spy stuff means, and we can learn quite a bit about it from the past, especially since that past is not all that different from the present.
