Leggi in ItalianoEvery now and then, I wonder how I ended up taking an interest in cryptography, despite being a lawyer. The answer is not particularly straightforward. Two very different influences, many years apart, eventually came together. The first had to do with my passion for aircraft; the second with a mathematician I met at university. In between were an old bookshop in Catania, a Sony radio, shortwave broadcasts, and a considerable number of books.
My fascination with aircraft goes back a long way. I started by building model airplanes, then moved on to collecting postcards featuring aircraft, followed by aviation stamps and first-day covers. It was one of those interests that, rather than fading away, kept leading me in new directions. At some point, while walking through Catania — several ice ages ago by now — I came across a book by Sgarro on aircraft radio communications. It caught my attention for a very simple reason: airplanes were not just things to look at, study, or collect. They talked. And there was a precise language, made up of frequencies, procedures, call signs, and standard phrases, that allowed pilots and air traffic controllers to understand one another.
Naturally, I wanted to listen. I started looking into what equipment I would need and what the rules were. I discovered that simply owning a receiver and listening to radio transmissions was not, in itself, something clandestine, although listening to, and especially disclosing, communications not intended for the public was subject to specific legal restrictions. What interested me most was hearing a part of the aviation world that, until then, I had known only on paper.
Then came an unexpected gift. Returning from a trip to Asia, my parents brought me a Sony ICF-2001D. Even today, it looks like something out of a 1980s science-fiction film: a numeric keypad, a digital display, an extraordinary range of functions, and the ability to explore a vast portion of the radio spectrum. To me, it was much more than a radio. If my interest in aircraft had led me to look for particular frequencies, that Sony opened the door to the shortwave bands.
It is worth remembering that this was a time when the internet was simply not part of everyday life for the overwhelming majority of people. Tuning in to a foreign station meant making direct contact with a distant part of the world through a voice emerging from static, interference, and the sudden fading of a signal. There was, of course, the legendary BBC World Service, but also stations from countries I knew little about, programmes in unfamiliar languages, and broadcasts I could identify only after consulting one of the many guides and reference books I had begun to buy.
One of the stations I sometimes listened to was Radio Iraq, which broadcast an English-language news bulletin in the evening. It was interesting precisely because it presented events from the perspective of the Iraqi government. I particularly remember listening to those broadcasts around the time of the 1991 Gulf War, while I was continuing my law studies. Moving between the news reported by major Western media and the version broadcast from Baghdad offered a very concrete lesson in how differently the same events could be presented depending on who was telling the story. And all this happened without a screen or a search engine, simply by moving from one frequency to another.
At a certain point, I decided to give this interest a more formal footing and obtained my Short Wave Listener (SWL)licence under the ministerial procedures in force at the time. I rather liked the idea of being an officially recognised radio listener. I carried on exploring the bands, searching for distant signals, and inevitably coming across increasingly unusual transmissions.
Some were genuinely hard to forget. A voice, often monotonous, would read out long sequences of numbers, sometimes letters, apparently without any meaning. No music, no news, no explanation. Just groups of characters repeated with almost obsessive regularity. I discovered that these were the famous numbers stations, generally associated with encrypted communications used by intelligence services and, in some cases, military organisations. Anyone with a suitable receiver could hear them; understanding the message was another matter entirely. That was exactly what fascinated me: a communication broadcast openly over the airwaves, yet designed to remain unintelligible to almost everyone.
I also happened to pick up US military communications on shortwave, including transmissions associated with the world of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Voices could be heard reading out strings of letters and numbers using the phonetic alphabet: Charlie, India, Oscar, two… Bravo, Mike… The signal was audible and the individual words perfectly recognisable, but their operational meaning remained beyond reach. It was then that I began to appreciate, in a very tangible way, the difference between hearing a communication and understanding what it meant.
That curiosity led me to buy books on the history of codes and ciphers. One of the most accessible and absorbing was Simon Singh’s The Code Book, which tells the long story of attempts to keep messages secret and of the equally ingenious efforts to decipher them. I had arrived at cryptography almost by accident, through the world of shortwave radio. Of course, I continued studying law, and for many years that interest remained largely in the background. It was a personal fascination, not yet part of my academic work.
Much later, at university, I met Massimiliano Sala, a mathematician whose work was directly concerned with cryptography. He had, and still has, no shortage of ideas and projects. One of them was to establish an association that could bring together the Italian cryptographic community. One day he asked whether I would like to be involved, joining its scientific committee in the rather unusual role of a lawyer among mathematicians. The association would become De Componendis Cifris (De Cifris), and I was happy to accept.
His invitation revived an interest that had never really disappeared. Over the years, my academic work had increasingly focused on national security, intelligence, and the relationship between public authority and technology. Cryptography was directly relevant to many of the questions I was studying: the confidentiality of communications, the protection of information, surveillance, and the limits of state power. I realised that lawyers had plenty of questions to put to cryptographers, and that listening to their answers was far more useful than trying to address those problems using legal concepts alone.
I find it amusing to think that all this began, at least in part, with model airplanes and a book I came across while walking through Catania. Today, when I work on the relationship between cryptography, law, and security, I sometimes think back to those voices on shortwave radio, reciting letters and numbers without explaining anything to anyone. Back then, I mainly wanted to know what they were saying. Over time, I came to realise that there was an even more interesting question: why, and under what conditions, should someone be able to communicate without others being able to understand what they are saying?