You Can Now See the Code That Helped End Apartheid

John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping maine often, but erstwhile helium does I wage attention. His time occupation is the CTO of the information elephantine CloudFlare, but helium is besides a laic historiographer of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He mightiness beryllium champion known for successfully starring a run to unit the UK authorities to apologize to the legendary machine scientist Alan Turing for prosecuting him for homosexuality and fundamentally harassing him to death. So erstwhile helium DM’d maine to accidental that helium had “a hellhole of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies afloat of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded.

The communicative helium shared centers astir Tim Jenkin, a erstwhile anti-apartheid activist. Jenkin grew up “as a regular racist achromatic South African,” arsenic helium described it erstwhile I contacted him. But erstwhile Jenkin traveled abroad—beyond the filters of the police-state government—he learned astir the brutal oppression successful his location country, and successful 1974 helium offered his assistance to the African National Congress, the banned enactment trying to overthrow the achromatic regime. He returned to South Africa and engaged arsenic an activist, distributing pamphlets. He had ever had a penchant for gadgetry and was skilled successful creating “leaflet bombs”—devices placed connected the thoroughfare that, erstwhile triggered, changeable anti-government flyers into the aerial to beryllium dispersed by the wind. Unfortunately, helium says, successful 1978 “we got nicked.” Jenkin was sentenced to 12 years successful prison.

Jenkin has a hacker mind—even arsenic a kid helium was fiddling with gadgets, and arsenic a teen helium took isolated and reassembled his motorcycle. Those skills proved his salvation. Working successful the woodshop, helium crafted mockups of the ample keys that could unlock the situation doors. After months of surreptitious carpentry and testing, helium and 2 colleagues walked retired of the situation and yet got to London.

It was the aboriginal 1980s, and the ANC’s efforts were flagging. The occupation was communications. Activists, particularly ANC leaders, were nether changeless surveillance by South African officials. “The determination was taken to get enactment figures backmost into the state to beryllium person to the activists, but to bash that they inactive had to beryllium successful interaction with the outside,” says Jenkin, who was fixed a mandate to lick the problem. Rudimentary methods—like invisible ink and sending codes by touch-tone dials—weren’t terribly effective. They wanted a connection strategy that was computerized and unbreakable. The program was dubbed Operation Vula.

Working successful his tiny assembly level successful the Islington vicinity successful London—nicknamed GCHQ, aft the top-secret British quality agency—Jenkins acceptable astir learning to code. It was the aboriginal days of PCs, and the instrumentality by today’s standards was laughably weak. Breakthroughs successful nationalist cardinal cryptography had travel retired a fewer years earlier, but determination was nary easy disposable implementation. And Jenkin was suspicious of prepackaged cryptosystems, fearing they mightiness harbor backmost doors that would supply governments access.

Using a Toshiba T1000 PC moving an aboriginal mentation of MS-DOS, Jenkin wrote a strategy utilizing the astir unafraid signifier of crypto, a one-time pad, which scrambles messages quality by quality utilizing a shared cardinal that’s arsenic agelong arsenic the connection itself. Using the program, an activistic could benignant a connection connected a machine and encrypt it with a floppy disk containing the one-time pad of random numbers. The activistic could past person the encrypted substance into audio signals and play them to a portion recorder, which would store them. Then, utilizing a nationalist phone, the activistic could call, say, ANC leaders successful London oregon Lusaka, Zambia, and play the tape. The recipient would usage a modem with an acoustic coupler to seizure the sounds, construe them backmost into integer signals, and decrypt the connection with Jenkin’s program.