#8216;Non-Code Codes#8217;a Way to Maintain Office E-Mail Privacy

8216Non-Code Codes8217a Way to Maintain Office E-Mail Privacy The boss of an IT-whiz friend of mine has ordered him to cc or forward to him the boss, all of his my friends emails to or from any other staff member, regardless of their content or email service used. Thats because my friends computer is the only one in the office network that is leid under real-time, on-screen surveillance with live access to employee emails.My friend has refused to comply and is currently looking into new job options for his formidable, high pay-grade talents.Now, thats really intrusive. So, what can you do to maintain some semblance of privacy and confidentialitynot to mention dignityunder such circumstances?Well, you cant encrypt your on-the-job emails into indecipherable strings with encryption software. That would merely provoke a confrontation, or at least raise grave suspicions.Encoding Hamlet as Duck DynastyI nstead, consider writing everything in readable, ordinary-language codeseemingly non-code code, if you will. If you think thats not easy, youre absolutely right, especially if you take things a step further and encode everything you write as perfectly normal, coherent text that doesnt at all resemble anything coded.That would be like undetectably encoding and transcribing the entire text of Shakespeares Hamlet as an episode of Duck Dynasty.I dont know enough cryptography to even begin to answer the question whether that is humanly or mathematically possible. Sure, individual words, no problem.For example, take care that, when writing about how many miles you traveled on your recent holiday, you dont let your entire right-hand slip one character to the left on your tastatur, because then miles will appear as nukes in your emailwith results you can imagine.So, as this method shows, one word or maybe even a sentence or two may easily be possible. But paragraph after paragraph? Heres an imaginable short reply, at work, to a fictitious emailed question about how many air miles I have on my Royal Bank of Canada Gold Card, using the simple shift-code described above Gave 55,356 nukes Have 55,356 miles. The point is that even this much is a challenge.Now, you may think suggesting youre handing over nukes is worse than revealing how many air miles you have but, if you think about it, the last thing a boss wants you to be thinking or writing about at work is your travel plans.Be that as it may, the point is that it wasnt easy to create even that much code, even when half the keyboardon the leftrequired no special coding.Hence, it seems to me that writing paragraph after paragraph to a Hamlet-Duck Dynasty encoding standard will be impossible for just about everyone, with the possible exception of those whose job is to do precisely thatwhich, of course, suggests they are probably already doing that with their own office emails as well as with their paid projects.However, dont despair. Theres a simple workaround Just preface every email you send, encoded or not, with THE FOLLOWING MAY BE AN ENCODED homilie. If it is intercepted by your boss or his software, youve got plausible deniability, e.g., Its really my project report, which I wanted to protect from unauthorized interception or surveillance. The problem is that my dog ate the code before I could code the code and send it.Kolmogorov, One Million Monkeys and Your BossThis office-email coding issue resonates with the well-known Kolmogorov test for complexity and randomness, e.g., of codes and that which they code, which, among other things, specifies that the longer the sequence of characters required to describe a second string of characters, the more closely the latter approximates a purely random, complex sequence.For example, both the code for and the sequence consisting of 1234123412341234, endlessly repeated, are simple and non-random, the code being write 1234 repeat indefinitely. On the o ther hand, 15436133221914378574. continued with no evident pattern whatsoever represents a code and a message far more complex and random.As an upper limit, a purely random, infinitely or indefinitely-long complex coded messages description and code is equivalent to the message itself. So, on analogy, can it not be argued that as non-random text indefinitely increases in length, the only coded descriptive recipe for it becomes the text itself?Note This tandem relationship between increasing complexity and increasing randomness of information needs to be compared with and distinguished from the relationship between biological complexity and randomness, which, on the face of it or at least on some interpretation, seem to vary inversely.The challenge of coded transcription of Hamlet into Duck Dynasty or of your emails into coherent concealment is also a variation on the million monkeys with a million typewriters thought experiment, which imagines that given enough time, one million mon keys will indeed flawlessly type out a compilable copy of Hamlet.However, in the email case, the prediction is not that eventually they would write Hamlet, but that they would/would not be caught and exposed after writing a Duck Dynasty episode as code for Hamlet.To Be or Not to Be CageyTherefore, if you preface every in-office or other email with THE FOLLOWING MAY BE AN ENCODED MESSAGE or THE FOLLOWING IS AN ENCODED MESSAGE, you may be able to retain some measure of privacy, if only because of the confusion you and the attendant employer exasperation will sow.As for which of the two versions, i.e., the IS AN ENCODED MESSAGE or MAY BE AN ENCODED MESSAGE, the choice will depend on whether you ever expect to have your coding abilities challenged or tested by your boss.One advantage of the MAY BE version is that it amounts to a randomized strategy that makes predicting whether or not youve encoded your emails very difficult.Besides protecting you from spot tests and challenges, it will , as a minimum will keep your boss off-balance and uncertain as to when to confront you.Hence, for now, for me and probably for you, MAY BE is likely to be the wiser choice.unless you think that at least one of us is looking at a perfectly coded article arguing the contrary and that you can prove or match it.___________Note In case it went unnoticed, there was some intended humor in this.