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A summary of why encryption wouldn't have prevented General Petraeus from getting caught. Like the quote: "If you think cryptography is the solution to your problem, you either don't understand cryptography or you don't understand your problem."

Interesting article describing the people who worked at Bletchley Park (UK) during WWII and the secrecy act that kept them silent. The article makes compelling comparisons to people today like Edward Snowden, who are legally bound to secrecy but ignore it. What are the ethical implications of being asked to keep military secrets? Of sharing military secrets? How do the differences between today's generation and the WWII generation affect how these ethics are viewed?

Not directly involving cryptography, but the implications of this definitely affect the field. Now that we have the capability to generate truly random number strings, our ability to encrypt data will improve.

Speed is generally considered exciting, but this blog post takes a different approach. It uses interesting examples, both foreign and familiar, to create a relative scale of speed. It is extremely easy to understand and informative. 

"Attorney General William P. Barr took aim at Facebook's plan to make WhatsApp and its other messaging services more secure, pressing its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to create a loophole to that goal of full encryption."

This blog has information about military cryptography and privacy in general, including this post about the Zimmermann Telegram. Is it ethical to lie to an ally if it is in their best interest? What are the ethics behind spying on one's allies? Do ethics hinder one's ability to win a war, and if so, should ethics be disregarded in times of war? Another interesting post examines how Snowden should be viewed as a patriot, not a traitor. This made me question where one's loyalty should remain- to the government or to the people?

This is a cryptography blogger's translation of Kerckhoff's article about military cryptography. He denotes that secret methods of communication are limited to higher officers due to potential leakage; but by limiting cryptographic use, are they potentially putting at risk the safety of lesser positions in order to keep the secrecy of their cipher methods? Is this just the inevitable nature of cryptography in general?

This is a blog by Bruce Schneier who writes about security in general, under which cryptography falls as a subject.

This article discusses the recent cloud hacks and security questions in general.

I got the General Petraeus story a bit wrong. He and his friend weren't using Google docs to communicate, they used a shared Gmail account. They would sometimes draft, but not send emails, as an extra measure of security, but, as this article points out, that doesn't work.

This article gives a method for generating secure yet easy to remember passwords for online accounts, using encryption and modular arithmetic (!). It is an interesting use of encryption in everyday life for something we all have, password-protected internet accounts. If you click through to the computer science category, you can find other posts on cryptography, encryption, and privacy.

Basic list of school security measures taken from NCES government website