Conspiracy theory number 9237

Who pulled off 9/11, and why? Clearly, among those who benefited were the neocons. But, the enormity of the 9/11 power grab makes me wonder: was a big part of the plotters' considerations the fight to control information?

In the world of the power elite, knowledge is power, and the internet revolution was threatening the hidden hands on society's control levers. There was an awful lot of hassle prior to 9/11 about the right of people to communicate secretly. The NSA was strongly suspected of weakening the NIST's Data Encryption Standard to make it vulnerable to NSA surveillance. The NSA tried to force the telecommunications industry to use a Clipper chip that would give the NSA keys to any encrypted communications.

Phil Zimmerman was threatened with prosecution for making Pretty Good Privacy encryption available on the net.

And, post 9/11, we have Congress pressing to assure that all encryption systems deposit keys with the U.S. government. Clearly, the telecom companies, in the main, thought they had to comply with warrantless surveillance given the tenor of the post-9/11 times.

One of the things that was barely noticed when the SWIFT financial data surveillance came to light was that new controls had been imposed after a spook was caught peeking at data for dubious reasons. Yes, well, knowledge is power.

If you can monitor secrets but others can't, you may be protecting the nation's security or you may be part of a scam to control business in such a way that competition is kept artfully in its place.

That is, plotters may easily have seen the subervsive 9/11 attack in context for their fight for global market dominance via control of information.

THE WORM TURNS
Below, I mentioned a couple of ideas for high-security encryption. A simpler method would be the exchange, via public key cryptograms, of a deterministic algorithm for generation of a a keyworm. Suppose you have a character set of 50. You use a specific pseudorandom number program to generate a random sequence of perhaps 2500 numerals such that 50 numerals are assigned to each character. "Eureka" would then be assigned two different numbers for "e," for example.

This is almost as good as a one-time pad. The chances of a numeral representing the same character twice are fairly low.

After the decrypt key is delivered, no message carries the key. The decrypt program runs the same pseudorandom generation program as the encrypt program, with the same initial input value. That value may simply be the final value of the previous message if a recursion algorithm is being used.

Of course, clever algorithms for numeral generation might be wise. If a well-known algorithm is used, the output should go through some disguise function, at a minimum multiplication or addition.