Mind Blown

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 20^th 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.