“Recording,” in fact, was the wrong word for it. Using a term that would become common parlance among hip-hop and electronic musicians fifty years later, they called this process “sampling.” Effectively, they were taking snapshots of the sound wave twenty thousand times a second, only those snapshots were written out in zeroes and ones: digital, not analog. Working with digital samples made it much easier to transmit them securely: anyone looking for a traditional analog signal would just hear a blast of digital noise. (SIGSALY was code-named “Green Hornet” because the raw information sounded
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