Crypto-keys: an old spy's tale

There were eleven of them, in his black-on-black company. They were benders, basically con artists, assassins, pushers, and prostitutes acting on federal authority. In their wake, they left a trail of bent rules, bent badges, bent ethics, bent choices, and bent fortunes. The company used various methods to get their way, but most of them boiled down to MICES (Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego, and Sex). Each agent had their own specialties.

One of the more mundane, bureaucratic aspects of the job was, even in the 80's, they had to come up with new crypto keys every year. These days, agents have a fancy computer algorithm do it for them every day. But back then, it was once a year... by hand. Computers were still quite rudimentary then.

The spymaster resembled Wilford Brimley, the Oatmeal Diabeetus Man. In his youth, he had been the stereotypical straw-hatted, Hawaiian shirt-clad, gold watch-wearing Levi's jeans gringo, bumming around South America, brokering arms-for-coke deals. But now, he was much more distinguished than that. Meaning he had other people do the dirt for him.

His team was ethnically and gender diverse. The women came in handy for making strange bedfellows in the name of espionage, and the ethnic minorities could go places that white people couldn't. Still, this was no dictatorship of the proletariat. Everyone in the unit had to be able to generate and remember these keys. That kind of aptitude was not only a requirement for membership in the program, it was often used as a rationalization for the company's heinous misdeeds at the expense of the goyum.

Analytical intelligence was over-valued then. This was before the world learned the difference between the wise and the clever: most people in the world were stupid, and a clever statistical minority lived lavishly via exploiting the stupid, but the wise wanted no part in these alpha/beta societies, and were often thrown out, like old Lao Tzu. But if you could do complicated algorithms in your head, it was a license to steal, kill, rape, and sell dope, all in the name of American justice. Each new key had to be derived from the previous one, and yet totally unique.

The black man's key was surprisingly complex this year. It revolved around prime number theory. He was a hulking figure who distributed product, smuggled by the military, in the ghetto, just to pay for a little off-the-books 'regime change' every now and then. He was a good earner by many accounts, an the spymaster was pleased to have his service.

The spymaster's son's keys were always based on the whimsical non-logic of numerology and the occult. The Spymaster could never figure out the twisted reasoning behind them, but that didn't matter, because the Spymaster's son was a screw-up, whose inclusion was only an acknowledgement of the fact that he was born into danger. His clearance was actually quite low.

The women often had to be lectured that their keys must be unique. They weren't allowed to copy eachother's homework. One of them was a musician, and worked something out with the musical scale to make new keys. Another paid a different Ivy League mathematician every year to devise a new key for her, inevitably ruining their lives when her enemies started messing with them, to extract their secret methodologies. But she could afford the collateral human resource cost: she was wealthy, beautiful, and connected in Hollywood. The third woman was in publishing and psychology. Her key was loosely related to the Greek archetypes.

The Chinese man's key involved kanji, something the Western mind could never fully understand. The Italian's key was a hodgepodge of simple algorithms. The Arab's key was algebraic, of course. The Mexican's key came from the randomness of nature: He threw bread to the pigeons in a different park every day, and counted how many he fed on each occasion. Tied to the day's date, it was always a random number.

Finally was the banker's key. The banker was the spymaster's right-hand man, who had previously smuggled heroin in Indo-China during Vietnam. Now he was an international man of mystery, keeping tabs on numbered accounts from the Caymans to Austrian Sparbuch. His key was usually based on simple mathematics, and his methods were easy to deduce. The Spymaster alternately wished the Banker would make more complicated keys, and yet was also grateful that a finite mind would always be under his control.

The Spymaster didn't make his key until everyone else had turned their in. His key was a combination of everyone else's, plus his own. It was the most difficult of them to deduce, plus it could over-ride any one of theirs, alone or in combination. But beyond all of these trivial superficialities, what did the keys unlock?

Well, data, of course. Data in computers. Paper data deliberately left uncomputerized. There were vaults, scattered all over the world, and these keys opened the vaults for their owners. The contents of the vaults varied, from paper currency, to jewels, to weapons, drug stashes, secret medical or scientific research specimens and prototypes, dead bodies, even mere garbage, perhaps the evidence from a stake-out.

Sometimes they had to kill politicians. Smart people don't like to be bossed around by the winners of shallow popularity contests. Sometimes they had to kill the wealthy, or co-opt them somehow. The spoils in these vaults came from these kinds of missions, and there were thousands of them littered everywhere all over the world, in facilities administrated by people who knew little of their contents.

Eventually the whole crew was killed. They died one by one. The Spymaster's son died of an overdose. He'd been hanging around too much with the black man. The Spymaster, unable to blame his son for his own bad judgment, had the black man killed in retaliation.

The movie star woman grew tired of spy games, and thought she could escape to Switzerland with a new face, but they got her with poison in less than 72 hours. The musician was plagiarized by imitators, who ate the pieces of her soul while she still lived. The woman in publishing was written out of her own story, revised to the cutting room floor.

The Chinese man got his throat slit while wallowing in his favorite opium den. The Arab gave too much to Al-Qaeda, even after the Russians lost Afghanistan, and he was eventually martyred by a team of Navy Seals. The Italian was killed by his own outfit, when they finally learned he was a spy. The Mexican was gunned down in a meth lab.

Finally there was only the Spymaster and the banker left. They both died of old age within minutes of eachother, like Jefferson and Adams. What's so sad is that all of these secrets and treasures, they never belonged to the most valiant, the most patriotic, or the most worthy... They were owned by those who were the best at devising random strings of letters and numbers!

And that's what left us with all of these vaults. Un-openable, their keys long forgotten. Only the most well-connected even knew of the vaults' existence. Because they knew there are a finite number of keys, and most of them were generated by reverse-engineerable algorithms, a billion computers could brute force it by generating random keys via these methods, and trying them in these computerized locks. When a vault was opened, if it wasn't a total bust, a fraction of its proceeds were put back into the token-mining system, to give the miners and traders incentive.

Of course, no one person has billions of computers, so a scam was devised to crowd-source the effort. Each successful attempt to break the cryptography of one particular lock was awarded a token of dubious value. People began trading these tokens. But there were thousands of vaults, and the newer ones could only be opened with the newest keys, which were the hardest to break. And thus, the cloud marched on, via the efforts of many, to the benefit of few...