About
Throughout history people have attempted to keep their messages private for a number of reasons. These include securing military actions, concealing love letters, or hiding nefarious actions. In order to do so, people have employed various forms of cryptography. Encoding language helps peoples’ private messages stay secret. As various forms of encoding language have gained popularity, actions have been taken to prevent their use, due to fear that encoding language will lead to criminal actions. At the same time, many governments employ the usage of encryption to make sure state secrets are kept.
This constant back and forth struggle for who is able to encode their language has continued into the internet age. One of the modal affordances of the internet is that records are left behind about what has been said. Tools such as the Wayback Machine allow people to view the history of websites and what was written on them at specific points in time. The permanence of written language along with the ubiquity of the internet have led to new forms of encoding language, some of which form the backbone of internet security used daily in communication software. This timeline gives an overview of how people have coded their language throughout time as well as the reactions and actions people have taken against secrecy in language.