There was a maxim in cryptography, often referred to as Schneier’s law after the cryptographer Bruce Schneier. It asserted that anyone can develop an encryption system clever enough that they can’t themselves think of a way to break it. Yet, like all the best conundrums and mysteries that had fascinated Meiklejohn since childhood, another person with a different way of approaching a cipher could look at that “unbreakable” system and immediately see a way to crack it and unspool a whole world of decrypted revelations.
