Passwords: Philology, Security, Authentication

by Brian Lennon

Cryptology, the mathematical and technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic study of natural or human languages, are typically understood as separate domains of activity. But Brian Lennon contends that these two domains, both concerned with authentication of text, should be viewed as contiguous. He argues that computing’s humanistic applications are as historically important as its mathematical and technical ones. What is more, these humanistic uses, no less than cryptological ones, are marked and constrained by the priorities of security and military institutions devoted to fighting wars and decoding intelligence.

Lennon’s history encompasses the first documented techniques for the statistical analysis of text, early experiments in mechanized literary analysis, electromechanical and electronic code-breaking and machine translation, early literary data processing, the computational philology of late twentieth-century humanities computing, and early twenty-first-century digital humanities. Throughout, Passwords makes clear the continuity between cryptology and philology, showing how the same practices flourish in literary study and in conditions of war.

Lennon emphasizes the convergence of cryptology and philology in the modern digital password. Like philologists, hackers use computational methods to break open the secrets coded in text. One of their preferred tools is the dictionary, that preeminent product of the philologist’s scholarly labor, which supplies the raw material for computational processing of natural language. Thus does the historic overlap of cryptology and philology persist in an artifact of computing―passwords―that many of us use every day.

Genres: Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

The last selection read for my semester one 'Digital Discourses' and one that I was incredibly interested in reading. The portions surrounding passwords (history of, connection to military defence, etc) were fascinating! Having worked with seniors to teach them one-on-one about digital literacy, passwords was always a befuddling concern, and has only worsened in recent years for laypeople attempting to access personal online accounts through public computers at the library. The book is marketed strongly on the focus of passwords, cryptology, and the military, yet it is the concern over digital humanities fields and their connection to and feeding of military defence organizations that is of large concern for Lennon. This book relies heavily on a lot of "inside baseball," which makes some portions impenetrable to those outside of (or simply disinterested in) the academic field of digital humanities. Though there is validity to these concerns, my personal preference would have been to read a book more strictly focused on the history of passwords and the impact of authentication in day to day lives.

[James Rayman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is possibly the densest text I've ever read. I got through the first two chapters and then gave up. I don't have a background in philology, but most other academic texts I've read, especially books, have been approachable to non-experts. I am familiar with cryptography, though, and of what I read, nothing was particularly insightful or illuminating, except for Lennon's thesis that cryptography and philology were historically intertwined, for which the evidence was buried about 30 dense pages in. As for the philology side, the second chapter cites David Khan's The Codebreakers and Simon Singh's The Code Book so heavily that I wonder if there is any value for a layperson to read Passwords instead of those books.

I don't think I'd necessarily call Passwords bad, but I don't have any reason or motivation to finish the book.

[Kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lennon presents an interesting thesis and offers intriguing premises, especially about the historical relationship between philology and cryptology, and how everyday users of the Internet use cryptographic principles in creating passwords. However, given the density of the text and nature of the narrative, namely Lennon's frequent suppositions about those in the nebulous sector of digital humanities working hand in foot with the American military-industrial and/or intelligence complex, this book will most likely only be of interest to graduate students or faculty researchers, and/or those readers predisposed to Lennon's conclusions.