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Speaker 1: Going back to ancient times, we go as we're going

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to learn about the skittily scy Tha l e before

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we get started, making sure to share and subscribe. Today

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we're looking at before algorithms, before the binary code, before

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anything we recognize.

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Speaker 2: As a computer.

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Speaker 1: The Spartan's built a military encryption system so elegant that

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survives centuries of warfare. Today we're going to explore the

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Siteles or Skittily, a wooden baton that turned a strip

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of leather into the ancient world's most guardly secret, most

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closely guarded secret. We go inside the Peloponnesian War to

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understand what it meant to trust a piece of wood

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with your army's survival. So I imagine you're a Spartan general.

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You're deep in enemy territory. Athenian scouts have been spotted

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on the ridge line, your supply lines are thinning, and

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your next move depends entirely on a message you've just

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received from Sparta. They run oer hands you a narrow

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strip of leather.

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Speaker 2: You look at it.

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Speaker 1: It's gibberish, just letters, random, meaningless, scattered across the hide,

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like someone drop the alphabet and never bothered to clean

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it up.

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Speaker 2: You pull a wooden baton from.

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Speaker 1: Your belt, You wrap the leather strap around it in

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a tight spiral, and then word by word, line by line,

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a sentence emerges between the gaps. Return im mediately Athens

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moves north. You've just witnessed the world's first documented transposition

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cipher and the device in your hand that's the skidily.

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And for a few critical centuries in ancient Greece, it

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was the difference between military victory and catastrophic, blood soaked failure.

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We're talking about the fifth century BC.

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Speaker 2: Here. Greece is not a unified nation.

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Speaker 1: It's a patchwork of city states, each with its own culture,

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military and political identity. Two of the most powerful are

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Athens in Sparta, and they've been locked in a cold

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war that's about to go.

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Speaker 2: Very very hot.

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Speaker 1: The Peloponnesian War runs from four thirty one to four

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h four BC, and it is the fining conflict of

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the ancient Greek world. Athens has the navy, Sparta has

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the army. Athens has philosophers and playwrights. Sparta has the

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most discipline's psychologically hardened soldiers in recorded history, men who

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are taken from their families at age seven and forged

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into something closer to.

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Speaker 2: Weapons than humans.

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Speaker 1: And Sparta also has something else, something quieter, something that

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almost nobody talks about when they talk about ancient warfare.

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They have operational security. Here's how the skiddy worked. And

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I wanted to tell you. I want you to really

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sit with the elegance of this, because it's stunning in

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its simplicity. The Spartan Military Commission a set of wooden

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batons cylindrical staffs, all cut to a very specific standardized diameter.

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One stays in Sparta, in the hands of the yepfors

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the governing Council. Another travels with the commanding General in

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the field, same diameter, same device. When Sparta needs to

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send a message, ascribe takes a long, thin strip of

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leather or parchment and winds it tightly around the baton

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in a diagonal spiral, edge to edge. Then they write

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the message lengthwise across the surface of the wrap leather,

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one letter per section, tracking down the baton like a

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column of text. Then they unwrapped the strip. What you're

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left with looks like pure noise, letters scattered across a

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long ribbon with no apparent logic. No word breaks, no

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identifiable sequence to anyone who intercepts it.

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Speaker 2: It's meaningless.

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Speaker 1: You could read it forwards, backwards, and columns and rows

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and get nothing. But the moment you wrap that strip

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around a baton of the same exact diameter, the spiral realigns,

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the columns of letters stack, the message surfaces like a

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photograph developing in a dark room. This is transposition cryptography,

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not substitution, where you wrap one letter for another, but transposition,

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where you physically.

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Speaker 2: Scramble the order of the letters.

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Speaker 1: The information is all there, it's just geometrically hidden, and

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in four hundred BC, that was enough to change the

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outcome of wars. Here's where it gets interesting, and this

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is the part that doesn't usually show up in the

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history textbooks. Imagine you're a spartan field commander. You received

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a message. You're runner made it through barely. You know

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Athens has agents on the roads. You know there are

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mercenaries who sell information whoever pays.

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Speaker 2: You know that the.

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Speaker 1: Leather strip your runner carried pass through dozens of miles

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of hostile territory. And here's a question that would have

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kept any rational commander awake at night. What if someone

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found a baton close enough in diameter to read it.

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This isn't paranoia, this is threat modeling. The sctile's entire

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security rested on one physical variable, the diameter of the staff.

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If an adversary could capture enough ENCRYPTID messages, could they

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reverse engineer the baton size through trial and error? Could

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they whittle a series of staffs of slightly varying wits

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until one made the message court Here we don't have

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clear historical evidence that the Athenians ever cracked Scaily this way,

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but the possibility was structurally real, and any commander who

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understood the system knew it. This is one of the

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earliest documented examples of what intelligence professionals today called cryptographics anxiety,

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the specific psychological burden of not knowing whether your communications

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have been compromised.

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Speaker 2: You operate on the assumption.

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Speaker 1: Of security, but you could never be certain, and in warfare,

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that uncertainty is its own kind of wound. Plutarch, writing

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centuries later, gives us some of our best documentation on

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the scittiy. He references it in his account of the

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Spartan general Lysander receiving a critical message, a warning about

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a conspiracy involving the Persian satrap far anabasis, wrapped in

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a belt delivered by a messenger. The message, once decode,

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it likely shaped one of the pivotal political maneuvers of

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the late Pilidiphnesian War. That's not a footnote, that's cryptography

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altering the arc of ancient geopololitics. What's remarkable is that

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the skittley wasn't just a clever trick.

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Speaker 2: It was institutionalized.

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Speaker 1: It was baked into Spartan military protocol at the state level.

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The eepers held one baton, the general held another.

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Speaker 2: This was infrastructure, this was policy. This is what we

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now call a.

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Speaker 1: Cryptographic key management system. Standardized, distributed, operationally integrated. SPARTA was,

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in a very real sense, the world's first crypto state.

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Time you send an encrypted message, every time your phone

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scrambles a text into your ciphertext before it leaves your hand,

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you're participating in a tradition that began on a hillside

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and Laconia with a wooden baton and a strip of leather.

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The tools have changed, yes, quantum computing is already threatening

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the encryption standards we rely on today, But the core problem,

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how do you send a secret across hostile territory without

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it being read. Is exactly what a Spartan scribe was solving.

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Twenty five hundred years ago, the skiddily did an ingest

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encrypt messages to encrypted trust had said, only someone who

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already has what you have can understand what you're telling them.

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In warfare and diplomacy and intelligence, that's still the whole

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game