ENIGMA

There is an obvious internal contradiction in the use of a public net for communicating with just one or limited group of addressees. So we start to select and protect access, addresses and routes. And the race starts between lock-makers and thieves finding out how to break it, between coding and decoding systems - a hot new cold war in the electronic networks.

Now we can either enter the race and try to win it - or evade this armament race altogether.
The second solution, which I favor - at least as a Gedankenexperiment, is the more radical, the more elegant one, perhaps initially a bit more risky. It is based on a reasoning which is ultimately an ethical one. It starts from the question: who is hiding what and for what reason? If I have nothing to hide I can face the risk easier to have others nosing around in my data than others who have to conceal their aims and resources. Furthermore: if this becomes a fairly widespread strategy the mere abundance of information (in which we will drown sooner or later anyway), and because of the lacking cues for secrecy and special value of data which are severely protected, eventually "thieves" might he discouraged.

The problem with most cryptic messages is at they are coded In a way which is recognizable as a code. Thus, even if the code cannot be broken, illegitimately interested parties know that it is a secret.
So in many cases, the best way to hide a secret is to hide it in the open, i.e. not to give away the fact that you want to keep it secret and "hide" or protect it only through the overwhelming amount of Information available. The risk of some outsider picking up this tiny item out of the immense haystack of other items might be no bigger than the chance that your cryptic code, which of course arouses interest on the side of the enemy", might be cracked.
This strategy of openness is, in any opinion, ultimately the winning one. It is said in diplomatic circles, that the work of double secret agents and leakage of classified Information through other "accidents" did more for the ending of the cold war and nuclear threats than the successful secrecy of operations of Intelligence services.
But, let's leave the military perspective. If we slip onto that level of reasoning, the most militant ones, i.e. those with aggressive, power-oriented interest and resources will win. I want to look instead into the notion of secrecy itself and into certain devices, inherent to language, which allow differentiation between potential addressees and non-addressees of our messages.

There is another kind of secrecy protecting the connection between sender and addressee. By way of contrast to the foregoing, we might call it a "natural" one. This is also justified by the fact that it makes use of certain typical features of natural languages. It concerns a secrecy inherent to the message itself. We could also call it hermetic communication or, in analogy to self-organizing structures", self-hiding secrets. In order to get a clearer picture of this way of communicating we have first to take a look at

a) the nature of natural language,
b) the (fatally ambiguous) notion of information, and
c) built-in strategies of recipient-selection in poetic, artistic and occult communication.