aryan brotherhood and computer science

Interesting article in the L.A. Times about how the Aryan Brotherhood used invisible ink to covertly send messages to each other. Basically, they used their own urine to write invisible messages. Not only that, they used a secret code to pass seemingly innocuous messages (in regular ink) and snuck it out underneath the guards’ noses.

Take a look at their codes. First, observe that the “A” script is a sans serif script while the “B” script is serif. So if you’re typing up secret messages on your home computer, you’ll want to use a combination of Arial and Times New Roman.

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Second, look at the way that the “A” scripts and “B” scripts combine to form other letters. Folks, this is just binary code, and transcription of something like this is first year Computer Science education. Think of the “A” as zeros and the “B” as ones. You get:

Aryan Script	Binary Equivalent	Alphabet Letter
ABABB	01011	A
ABBAB	01101	B
ABBBA	01110	C
ABBBB	01111	D
BAAAA	10000	E
BBBAB	11101	F

And so forth. The only thing that’s weird about this scheme is it starts at hexadecimal 0xB, and doesn’t increment in any rational order. I suppose if you’re trying to avoid detection from large guards who will come and beat your ass for sending secret notes, and you are in Supermax for multiple life sentences and have all the time in the world to memorize crazy schemes, it doesn’t hurt to add an element of randomness to your code.

Finally note that they needed 5 letters per group to encode every letter of our alphabet. This is because 2⁴ is only 16, and you won’t be able to encode every letter if you only use groups of four. On the other hand, 2⁵ is 32, which gives you more than enough combinations to encode all 26 letters.

For a bonus, let’s see if there are 9 letters you could eliminate from the alphabet so that you only need 4 bits for encoding.

• C because the hard C can be replaced with K and the soft C can be replaced with S
• Q because you can again replace with K
• X … man, that K sure is handy
• U because the Romans didn’t need it, so why would you?
• J because it can be replaced with G

Well, that’s 5. Only 4 more to go, and you can save yourself a bit in your encoding. May not seem like a lot, but over a long enough text, saving 20% is pretty good!

And that’s today’s computer science lesson, courtesy of the Aryan Brotherhood.

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