Computer and Information Security Handbook

Chapter 25

Satellite Encryption

Daniel S. Soper, California State University

For virtually all of human history, the communication of information was relegated to the surface of the Earth. Whether written or spoken, transmitted by land, sea, or air, all messages had one thing in common: They were, like those who created them, inescapably bound to the terrestrial surface.

In February 1945, however, the landscape of human communication was forever altered when an article by the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke proposed the extraordinary possibility that artificial satellites placed into orbit above the Earth could be used to facilitate mass communication on a global scale. A year later, a Project RAND report concluded that “A satellite ...