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David Kahn is a US historian, journalist and writer. He has written extensively on the history of cryptography and military intelligence and related subjects. Kahn's first book was The Codebreakers (1967), widely considered a definitive account of the history of cryptography, up to the early 1960s. In particular, the story of cryptography in World War II was still then effectively classified. The most recent edition, published in 1996, has an additional chapter surveying with less depth events and breakthroughs in cryptology since the first edition, such as the advent of public key cryptography and PGP. The Codebreakers was a finalist for the non-fiction Pulitzer prize in 1968. David Kahn also wrote: Kahn traces his interest in cryptography to reading Fletcher Pratt's Secret and Urgent as a boy. Kahn is a founding editor of the Cryptologia journal. Kahn was awarded a doctorate (DPhil) from Oxford University in 1974 in modern German history under the supervision of the then Regius professor of modern history, Hugh Trevor-Roper. He worked as a reporter and an op-ed editor for Newsday until 1998, and journalism for a few years at New York University. In 1995, Kahn was selected as the scholar in residence at the National Security Agency. Kahn lives (as of 2005) in Great Neck, Long Island, a suburb of New York. He has lived in Washington, D.C.; Paris, France; Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany; and Oxford, England. He attended Bucknell University as an undergraduate. After graduation, he worked as a reporter at Newsday for several years. It was during this period that he wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine about two defectors from the National Security Agency. This article was the origin of his book The Codebreakers. Subsequently, Kahn was an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris for two years in the 1960s. He has two sons, Oliver and Michael.
Quote The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write. (from The Codebreakers quoted at Liberty-Tree.ca) | ||||||||
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