Free public resource

Encryption for Humans

Can't be hacked, censored, regulated, or surveilled.

In 1882, a California banker named Frank Miller needed a way to protect business transactions. The telegraph wire was fast, but it was not private enough; bank instructions passed through offices, operators, and too many hands. He published his brilliant solution in a little book: Telegraphic Code to Insure Privacy and Secrecy in the Transmission of Telegrams.

Miller's mathematical discovery was a hidden masterpiece: scramble the message with an encryption key of the same size, never re-used. No reused keys meant no pattern for a codebreaker to find. His discovery sat largely dormant until it was re-discovered in the 1900s and coined as the One-Time Pad, named for the single-use nature and the pads of paper the keys were written on.

In the early days of the Cold War, Western intelligence agencies intercepted and decrypted hundreds of thousands of Soviet diplomatic and espionage messages. But on October 29, 1948 — a date dubbed as "Black Friday" — the Soviet Union pivoted to using the One-Time Pad for high-level military, naval, and air force radio traffic. This blinded American and British signal intelligence literally overnight, making interception of Russian radio signals useless.

Fast forward to today, and debates rage on over encryption, messaging apps, backdoors, and government-run mass surveillance programs. Yet the fact remains: the One-Time Pad is unbreakable. This mathematically proven fact will never change. No government agency, no corporation, no data center, no technological breakthrough can ever hope to compromise this eternal truth.

But what about the electronic devices themselves? The phones, the computers, the apps? Can we trust them? By implementing the One-Time Pad with pencil and paper, there's no need for such trust. Electronic devices send the scrambled ciphertext at modern speed, but — just like Miller's 1882 telegraph — the "wire" never sees the original plaintext message. That privacy is guarded by a sheet of paper which can be crumbled up and destroyed.

Privacy is a basic human right, and one of the most easily defended. All it takes is a little know-how. Encryption for Humans exists to provide streamlined pencil and paper tools to make unbreakable One-Time Pad encryption straightforward and easy.

Free for anyone to download, print, and use.

Both downloads do the same job. Pick the flavor that feels right for you.