Not only did he have a relationship with the government, but he had a ball in the FBI In this world, you look out for number one With any people take that ball to the grave these guys are on the street. So they're involved in hustling Welcome back to the original gangsters podcast. I'm Jimmy Buccellato with my co-host Scott Bernstein And our producer senor a Roberto Boschane Uh, we're super excited to have George Christie as our guest today George is the true embodiment of a rebel with a cause George served in the United States Navy, but by the 1970s He was a full patched member of the Hell's Angels motorcycle chapter Motorcycle club in Ventura, California He became a charismatic leader of the club and and probably the only I think not probably he was the only Oh gee, I can think of to actually carry the olympic torch during the 1984 olympics He's led a fascinating life. George is a friend to some counterculture icons that we will talk about George himself is iconic I just to let the audience understand that you know at at george's peak um, he was Without question one of the top let's say two three Biker gang powers in the whole world. I mean there weren't many people in that Space that held as much sway had as much respect Uh, and were as much of a pioneer as as as george christian Yeah, he's he's a big deal where he rubbed elbows with some well-known underworld figures So we'll also also ask him about that And because he was so high-profile and charismatic that meant he also drew the attention of local state and federal law enforcement So we'll ask him about some of his legendary battles with the state And then finally we'll talk to george about his interesting life today his books his tv projects his social activism One man show interesting. So thank you for joining us george. We're happy to have you on the og podcast Well, it's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the stellar, uh, introduction You deserve it a luminary like yourself is always welcome here in the original gangsters podcast We guys were talking about me, right? Yes That's right. I think we're right. We have the right guy a true og luminary So to start off george could you need to talk to us tell us tell our listeners What was it like in the 1970s to to be one of uh, you know the earliest members of uh, this really important chapter Hell's angels motorcycle club Well, you know, it's it's interesting. I I hung out uh with a fellow named danie brooker in high school. We were buddies and His father owned a movie car rental business and he rented the cars to the movies and Ultimately, he wound up owning movie land cars of the stars was just Maybe a mile from knots berry farm And uh, peter fonda's uh bike was in it You know all these famous cars from these different movies all the untouchable cars the bonnie and clad car The one that got shot up in but after school we would go out to somans just outside of camarillo and We'd hang out at the ranch and at the ranch was a fellow named dick woods Who was way ahead of his time? And he was the maintenance guy for the movie land cars of the stars And he also started the question mark Motorcycle club that was became a one percenter club endorsed by the hell's angels and the saint slaves And that's where I got my introduction now. I I didn't go in the navy. I went in the marines. Oh, I apologize. That's okay. No, that's fine And like when I came back I got some trouble in the marines Having problem with the taking orders from people I didn't respect Imagine that So I got offered a job At the department of defense. They you know, I was scoring real high on Everything I was doing real good. I just was having trouble taking orders from some of the people so I went to work for the department of defense and I started Hanging out with the question marks more and more They drug me down to san fernando valley. We rode down there I started hanging out with the saint slaves and then All to me this the saint slaves put me up to kern river. That was a big run in the 60s in the early 70s and The hell's angels showed up there from los angeles And there was one guy in particular. Oh, man, john It was kind of a legend back then he was old back then. I don't know Uh And he was your typical looking old school biker, you know, big gray beard Big guy six four hands looked like baseball gloves And he just basically took me under his wing, you know, he Invited me to come to the clubhouse in glendale. That was los angeles and I went down there and You know, within a few months Uh, I became a member and he mentored me and he actually turned the hell's angels los angeles Charter over to me Uh, right in the midst of that, uh, battle with the mongols, you know, we were in The whole dynamics of the outlaw bike world changed, uh That one summer in uh, 1977 was that oh it's 70s because this is way after altamont Yes, now we're any of those any of those guys that you knew involved in that Oh, yeah, uh, paul hibbet His name was animal animal hung out at the ranch, uh With the rest of the question marks Uh, and he got in trouble in probably 1966 at school Had a problem with the teacher he threatened one of the teachers and the cop showed up He drove out the window and he actually Ran off and joined the hell's angels uh wound up in the bay area and uh He was the guy at altamont that was running around with the fox head hat on i don't know if you recall that guy And he's the guy that knocked out, um, marty ballon from jibberson That's a famous Episode from uh from from from the altamont Didn't he use like a pool cue or something? No, he actually you know animal was a pretty rugged character and Him and marty were friends And marty was really upset because the hell's angels were One of the guys was he was working over some of the people with a pool cue because we were trying to push the people back From the stage they were pushing the bikes over They were leaning on them and the bikes were falling over It was just complete chaos so marty Said he wasn't going to perform so The one of the i don't know if it was sunny or one of the other leaders said go talk to marty get him to you know start up again And you know animal went up and said hey marty come on man You know it's just a misunderstanding and marty ballon started cursing at him And animal said hey look we're friends, but we're not that good of friends Yeah, he seemed like kind of a hothead marty ballon. Yeah.  Yeah And then the murder was caught on the stabbing of that uh the concertgoer Yeah, alan tozaro stabbed uh meredith hunter meredith hunter was pointing a gun at the stage right And i'll tell you that tape uh hadn't existed alan probably would have got found guilty, but they played the raw footage in the uh trial and uh Ultimately alan was found not guilty like a justifiable homicide And uh, but that started a problem between the hell's angels and the rolling stones that lasted a decade They were supposed to pay for all legal fees And jagger did not want to pay the legal fees. They were fifty thousand dollars, which probably was pocket change to those guys even back then And he was just being stubborn.   It was in the new york harbor And uh, one of the guys in the boat, uh butch crowdy His name is clarence crowdy Became an informant and he told the police that and the police told the stones that And we had a check for fifty thousand dollars, uh, within a few days That's gangster. Yeah, that's a great story. Thank you And just that's great In george, just to give uh the audience Some some understanding of some of the names you were throwing out there One of the names you threw out there was sonny and he's referencing just for the the audience that that doesn't know the history of the Hell's angels Ralph sonny barger was the uh original godfather the founder Of the hell's angels motorcycle club and a lot of people kind of Trace the roots to kind of modern day motor Slight a lot of people trace the roots to modern day motorcycle culture Uh to kind of barger's vision Well, he's certainly an icon. I mean, you know, he uh Taught me a lot of things, uh, you know him and i're at odds now But you know, there was a period where you know, I would go to the bay area I stayed his house when he came to southern california. He stayed at my house He's he's an icon. You can't take that away from him Uh In the mid eighties we started the politically Establishing uh different goals for the club And uh, it's it's an interesting story. What happened was I don't know if you're aware of this, uh, sonny lost his, uh vocal cords in the About with cancer and they took out his larynx. He couldn't talk.  I mean we all had big egos and uh, you know, it's it's different than a criminal like Organization like the mob that you know, they don't want any publicity and whatnot We can't help Gondering publicity because we're out there with our patches on every day Visible we're easy targets. And I think that's why a lot of law enforcement like the atf and other, uh, federal uh agencies started focusing on us because we were very very easy to investigate All you had to do is get in your car and start taking pictures You know we're riding all over town with our patches on and whatnot but so Once you relinquish your power as a leader It's very difficult sometimes to get it back because what happens is you're centered a mixed message to the general membership And that is you know, I've got a new guy here. I want you to listen to him So when you try to retake that power it becomes a real struggle and I know in the Bay area I rich wound up getting murdered in the late 80s early 90s And you know, it was a real suspicious type deal, but you know, nobody was ever prosecuted So, you know sonny and I Were great friends at one time and then you know, we became uh at odds politically with each other You know, like I said different visions but uh initially, uh Everybody was kind of following him as you said he was a real icon and he was a real uh Pioneer in the whole outlaw bike Culture just to give a little context real quick. Uh, michael irish o' farrell was murdered in the summer of 1989 Okay, I couldn't remember when it was. Yeah, uh It was a very suspicious circumstances and Uh, let's let's talk about that time during the 80s when when maybe things were more uh Friendly between the factions and one of the my favorite stories Um from your life is is the 1984 olympics story And so if you could give us some background on how the the motorcycle club was you were you were involved in some Social activism giving back to the community and your adversaries in the state and the district attorney they didn't like that and then um Then you get involved in the olympics and it's even more, um, you know, uh controversial. Yeah even more so Can you can you walk us through that? Yeah, you know, it's interesting in 1984 the olympics were uh coming to los angeles Some of the events were going to take place At lake casitas the water events the water events specifically And the atf came to town was a squad out of akron ohio and they came to town and they had security, uh For the lake and surrounding areas One what they didn't understand was we had a unique relationship in ventura I had made a point to integrate ourselves In the community like you said with doing social things and giving to charities and whatnot And I had made a lot of friends, uh With the businessmen and when the atf came to town they went on this Character assassination campaign and they were showing the business leaders in town and private businesses Uh pictures of murdered bodies talking about we need to watch these guys real close They're probably going to try to supply weapons to terrorists I started getting phone calls from the local merchants saying hey these guys are down here talking crazy And I thought uh we had to get out in front of this and you know, what I did was Along with a member from san fernando valley named tiny of we decided that we would get involved in the olympic torch relay and uh For $3,000 you could make a donation and you could participate And uh, that's what we did we donated the money Of and then waited uh for the olympic torch relay committee to accept our donation So we could actually carry the torch for one kilometer Now what I did was I filled out the paperwork and it's I listed it as our business or a corporation H a m c us hells angels motorcycle club united states So the acronym was hamcus And they didn't know who in the hell hamcus was So I thought that I Learned how to use the media. I've been watching uh How the police were using it against us and I was trying to turn the tide and turn the table a little bit I had a friend that was a reporter in the la times and I went to her and uh She went to the olympic torch relay committee and said are you going to accept uh hamcus as a participant? But and they said well, of course, why wouldn't we and she goes well because it's the hells angels And then it turned into a big controversy and ultimately they decided they had to uh, Let us uh carry the torch and it just turned into this huge Uh media coup for the hells angels, you know, we became uh, not only uh Participants You know, but sponsors of the olympics and that footage I mean when you're when you're running with the torch, I mean everyone's cheering you guys on tell us about how did Law enforcement react to that. I mean what I mean that must have really burned their um, well Yeah, they were not happy about that. In fact, I had The layers on to the ventura hells angels was a police officer named sergeant handy who him and I Were you know, we were we became friends over, you know, 20 years you become friends with a guy even You know, he can be on a different team And you know, he never said anything to me or asked me any compromising questions I never asked him any so we developed this mutual respect And he came to me and said george these guys are mad. You've got to lay off the media attention And uh, I sent a message back, you know through him. I said well, you guys wanted to play hardball so We're playing hardball and I wasn't about to let up because It was all coming in our favor, you know, it was all positive Stuff for us positive input from the community and you know on a Not just the national level it became an international level level because the olympics are an international event Now, I don't know if you guys know what happened about four to six weeks after the torch relay Somebody threw a hand grenade in the clubhouse Oh, right. I suspected it possibly came from law enforcement. Well, I'll tell you what I did was I got a phone call that there was an explosion at the uh Clubhouse I got down there immediately.  That's how fast I got down there and They had the place all rough route roped off and the bomb squad was going through other Trying to look at all the vehicles around there and then the front door of the clubhouse I saw something that attracted my attention And it was the spoon Of this hand grenade they had thrown in there So I asked one of the local cops. I said, can you give me the lot number off that spoon? You know having a military background. I knew We could do some investigation and follow out You know backtracing find out where it came from And I did a hire to xfbi agent investigator And uh, he traced it and the hand grenade Was missing from an armory in akron ohio The same place the atf unit That was guarding the olympics Was based out of let's sketchy Yeah, it's very sketchy.  He was in the hospital several days And uh, you know, immediately the cop said he was building a bomb. That's uh, You know what the explosion was the cover store Yeah, that was a cover store. George around around that same time there was a uh, the murder of a The son of a pretty powerful gangland figure in la by the name of eddie nash If anyone's seen the movie wonderland or or is familiar with the john holmes Saga eddie nash was kind of the mob boss. He was pal.  His son ended up dead. I believe in 1984 Um, I think there was alleged ties to some beef with the hell's angels. Is there anything any light you could shed on that? Well, you know I don't know Didn't know eddie nash. I know that there was inferences that you know, we somehow had an issue with him uh You know in 1986 I was set up by a member of the mexican mafia that That prison gang that pretty much ran the california penal system la m a Yeah, la m a and uh, I was good friends with mike isan Who was one of the top uh echelon guys? And After mike got arrested This guy showed up at the clubhouse and his name was mike molher And he was one of the Founding guys as well.  Yeah, joe peck peck like joe morgan for people that for people don't know He's a fascinating figure in the history of american Underworld joe morgan was a Croatian that grew up in an all hispanic neighborhood in la and eventually Rows through the ranks of the mexican mafia to become one of the the biggest shot callers In that gang I would say I would say he is the shot caller or was a shot caller. He died in prison. He died up in pelican bay uh from cancer And he had a Croatian guy that became the godfather of the mexican mafia, which is just interesting on its uh on its face just riveting Yeah, he he used to call uh, they would call down from pelican bay I would talk to mike isan and I would talk to joe morgan They were in the cells next to each other and these guys never got out of their cells They actually Created a shower unit that would come down the hallway And they'd unrack the door and they'd step into the shower and never never get out of their cells And uh, it was some real rough time for them.  I'm interested, you know, kind of on a quick aside when we're talking about the mexican mafia and the Hell's angels dealings with them the mexican mafia kind of Not kind of but they they really Invented the concept of if you control the inside you can control the outside Um, was that something that you were aware of when it was happening. Did you see it kind of? evolving Absolutely, they they taxed every street gang in southern california And if you and joe morgan came up with the idea along with, you know, the other guys that Eventually all these street gang members are going to wind up In the california penal system so If they're selling drugs on the street We want a taste of it And if they don't pay us as soon as one of their a guy from whatever street it may be 22nd street or whatever gets rolled up and shows up In the california state prison At these people haven't been paying their tax.  Yeah, I'm sorry. This guy. It's quite all right Mike Mulhern Came to me and he said you and I have some mutual friends. I didn't know him personally and I said, oh really who do we uh Who do we have as friends and he goes mike isan and well, mike Like I said was one of the top tier guys I said, oh, yeah, mike isan and I are good friends and he said look george. I've come to you I we got a problem and I said what's the problem and he said uh There's a guy out in prison in arizona that owes The mexican mafia ten thousand dollars. He's in federal prison And we've come to you guys. We figured you'd pay the bill So we don't disrupt our uh relationship And you know, I told him I said i'm not paying them ten thousand dollars for this guy And I knew who the guy was and he had a history of Masquerading as a hell's angel. So it made sense Well unbeknownst to me This guy had been working and unbeknownst to the mexican mafia. This guy had been working with the feds for almost a decade And uh, he was recording everything we were saying And uh, you know, he basically got me on tapes You know, he said look if you don't pay the ten thousand dollars, we're gonna kill him You got a problem with that and I said no and uh I got uh murder for hire a conspiracy beef over that I was looking at life on one count 20 on the other And they tried to present it to the jury that this guy was dead and uh You know, he actually was in the witness protection program Mike mollard was in the witness protection program and the target guy was in the witness protection program as well They actually staged a murder at the prison And uh closed the yard down wheeled him out of there on a gurney and put him in an ambulance and drove him out I mean everybody thought he was dead because they were trying to get me in some more incriminating conversations and They came back to me and said well, you know, we killed the guy, you know, I said well None of my business that's your business and uh They didn't have that recording The tape recorder didn't work that day Yeah It's interesting. So at this point George, I mean the feds consider him and and local The cops consider him a public enemy and and George and I have talked about something that I think is an interesting position he has which is Look, if I if you catch me doing something then I'll do my time and take my medicine, but but don't manufacture Evidence against me such a thin line sometimes people don't realize the thin line between the good guys and the bad guys Right if you could comment on that George Well, you know it's interesting As you said during our conversation a few days ago, you know Been in prison three times All for things I had nothing to do with the things I did do You know, they never even came close And you know, I guess uh, maybe at the end of the day it balances out I don't know if that's really fair and like I told you in my last case in 2011 The case went on for three years and in 2013 You know, we were fighting it out picking the jury My daughter was one of my criminal lawyers. My oldest daughter's also my criminal lawyer and Finally the judge had had enough judge who and he looked at the u.s. Attorney And he said look this case isn't what you want it to be you want this to build Your career, but it's not there because you got this guy looking at three life sentences And you've got no evidence and I I was feeling Pretty powerful at the time. I thought gee he's gonna dismiss from the bench a direct dismissal And uh, and then he looked at me and he said I knew mr. Christie.  I had two years Time served and I went to texas for a year, but there's a perfect example of Not having anything to do with this particular crime You know, even in the police and the fbi reports the fbi 302 They said did mr. Christie tell you to fire bomb the tattoo shops and uh No, he didn't but I knew what mr. Christie was thinking It's right in the 302. I mean, it's just amazing that he can read minds They can read minds when they knew what I was thinking. Well, I'll tell you the philosophy from the federal government is that the Ends justify the means Now, I mean that that's up for debate whether or not that that holds water But I know from talking to a lot of these guys when they'll kind of wink wink and admit that they Uh stretch the law sometimes and and and kind of step over those boundaries.  I don't want to do this anymore and I took my patch off and put it on the table You know didn't go over well, but I you know, I walked out of there Within two weeks the feds invited me, you know, three weeks.   You can take the whole house down. You know, what do you want? You know, I said I want to go to trial.  That's their exact words and it took them 30 years to do it But they kept their word, uh, and they did it and you know, they passed that vendetta on To the younger agents, uh as they came on board and the older guys retired You know, I outlasted. I think seven presidents You know, my political tenure in the hell's angels was, you know Through seven presidents starting with uh, think forward, you know george can you It was I was just going to say speaking along these lines of manufacturing evidence are really interesting Situation happened where george did happen to know and be friendly with some some heavy weights in the italian mafia and because of that The state started to connect dots that weren't there Right, so if you could talk to us about how they how they extrapolated from your friendship with some with some y guys and then and then um Created this notion that see this is the evidence We have of this nexus between the motorcycle clubs and the italians and they're all in it together And if you can talk to us about that, yeah well, you know, it's It's interesting how they make these quantum leaps now when I went down To terminal island the federal Prison, you know, now they have the methyl polyten detention center in downtown l.a. But back in the 80s when you got into it You went to terminal island it was There were like five levels in there because it was a Like receiving Center so you never knew who was going to show up there It was a medical center as well. So i'm down there and you know, I get introduced to these guys from uh, new york, you know Rosario Gambino he's doing 41 years For the pizza connection michael Franchese he's down there. He just stole The allegedly 10 million dollars in gas tax money from new york and then you've got the sam sarantino The la boss down there him and carlis marcello got involved Trying to bribe a judge uh, so you know, you had all these Underworld heavyweights there and then you know, plus you had a lot of soldiers and whatnot in there Uh, I can't remember the guy's name, but he was the first guy to ever get blackball He was putting a black book in vegas Uh, he was doing time there uh for throwing acid in somebody's face that wouldn't pay him You know who that is johnny you remember who that was johnny deal Oh, I don't know. I don't remember either. Okay. Well anyhow, sorry. Yeah, go ahead george. Anyways, nevertheless, so, you know, I created this relationship with these guys from new york and You know i'm fighting my case and south, you know Rosario, I called himself and I became very good friends. We worked in the kitchen together And he he made a mean pasta So when I got out He had given me all these numbers in new york to these social clubs when you go to new york, you know Tell them you're my buddy and this and that and you know, it was kind of a Just a coincidence that I met these guys In the interim As i'm getting ready to defend myself this 1986 case I wind up using a lawyer named alan kaplan. He's a Really good rico attorney. He did the pizza connection. He did the stardust skimming case and From the movie casino was made for him And when I come home They start putting everything together my house gets raided And this will tell you how long ago this was as I mentioned to you when we initially talked this They take my rolodex and in my rolodex are all these Mob guys numbers that rosario gave me for me to stay in contact with or by show up in any particular town They'll show me a good time So they call the newspapers up and they say, you know, we raided george's house We didn't find anything but we found something very interesting in his rolodex Are these numbers call these known mob figures made guys social clubs? So the newspapers call me And uh They said so how do you explain all these numbers in your rolodex? And my answer to them was well, you know mickey roark's number And sean penn's number was also in my rolodex, but that doesn't make me an actor The cops were so mad because they they put that in the newspapers But shortly after that can I ask you about that though really quick like what was your I know mickey roark and a lot of these guys like to hang out with tough angels guys I know, you know chuck zito was close with a lot of these guys mickey roark and whatnot. I mean um Did you was that a respectful or mutual respect thing or Well, you know mickey and I became very good friends and mickey actually came to my trial He would come and sit in the front row and He was Uh, you know really excited this one mickey was at the top of this game You know, they were really excited to see into the trial and uh, you know We were using everything we could because the tapes were so dammy against me But I I think that you know a lot of these guys, uh, you know, they like to come around They like the excitement of that lifestyle, you know, they emulate a lot of these guys All this friend and I think to hang out with uh You know mickey hung out with the hell's angels. Uh, he hung out with uh, a lot of guys out of new york I know he went to gaudi's trials You know, so he kind of liked that lifestyle But getting back to this right Because alan kaplan Initially was my lawyer on this case We had to take alan off the case because he we'd given him a motorcycle as a gift and he got correct and hurt himself Through a bat. He had his foot amputated So barry taro took over for him as my defense attorney and because He had done these skimming cases and helped teamsters they thought somehow along with these Numbers they made a quantum leap all these numbers in my rillagex That I had a connection to organize crime And my father and mother my dad's name was george gusts christy senior. I'm george gusts christy jr My father and mother used to go to vegas all the time every six weeks and gamble And these guys started investigating me, uh, so heavy That there was actually reports from the ventura county district attorney that I was going to vegas george christy was going to vegas and he was staying at one of the old mob hotels and people just skimped by the every four six weeks And this was actually uh in one of the reports and they these guys believed this And I became friends with uh Someone of the uh of the five families out of new york. I became very good friends with him all by coincidence Uh He wanted a good order for his brother And he asked me if I would meet him and I met him and him and I hit it off and we became very good friends We visited each other and I go to new york and hang out with him and he'd come to ventura and hang out And the they had video of us hanging out together pictures of us and uh Which they felt solidified This rumor that I was picking up skim money out of these hotels out of vegas. I mean it was just Just a ludicrous Quantum leap. I mean there was nothing based In foundation of evidence. It was just just concepts these guys had they went so far as the ventura district attorney's office sent to district attorney investigators to robert blakie To you guys remember who robert yeah jfk, right big um, well also the uh, hold on Yeah Hello Yeah, how long did I get pulled out? Let me like a second. I think it was I think it was all right there Okay, uh, you remember who robert blakie. Yeah, right um the Very instrumental in uh, didn't he work for rfk and investigated the jfk assassination? Absolutely, right. They actually sent two of them ventura district attorney investigators to robert blakie To get his opinion if there was a possibility. I was somehow tied in to these uh crime figures and I was getting skim money at this What did blake what did blakie? How did he what was his uh, the audience, you know, he said well, you know Where's your evidence? right, right I actually called him after my uh, 2001 2002 case And he was really aghast to talk to unfortunately I guess he's Approach by so many law enforcement personnel. He didn't even remember Unless unless he was just being elusive to me, you know, he said, you know, I george. I really Don't remember them coming here But uh, you know, I explained the situation to him and he said well, what did I say and I I told him what he said he laughed And I believe he was instrumental in crafting the riko Statute absolutely as well. Yeah, he he helped draft that law which uh, you know, they used that on us in 1979 up in San Francisco, uh, judge conty And you know who the prosecutor was on that? 1979 racketeering case in San Francisco was right. Uh, no remind me Robert Mueller. Oh, yes, right.  They'd spent so much money and the the jury Just didn't buy There was a big deal in the criminal justice system because That was, you know, the feds were hot to prove that the the hell's angels motorcycle club Was the equivalent of the Italian mafia just on motorcycles and when that case failed that was, um, they had to go back to the drawing board and and rethink the way they were approaching um going after the the um motorcycle clubs You're absolutely correct. I mean they You know, they referred to us as the number two Criminal organization in the united states, uh, you know, second to the mafia And uh, they called us, uh, you know, the mafia on two wheels is how they described this and uh, it just it just didn't fly in the courtroom And you're absolutely correct. They went back To the drawing board and they came back with operation rough rider in 1984 And they they came after individual members and uh, you know, my Position on that whole thing was I went back to some of the trials in new york In the federal building there and what they basically did was they took low level drug dealers and gave them an opportunity For money and larger amounts of drugs they were supplying the money and they were supplying the drugs You know, so what they would did is they took low level drug dealers and were basically Selling drugs to you know party with and uh, maybe to supplement, you know, their income somewhat I mean not a lot of dough And they turned them into uh, you know higher level drug dealers with government money Wow, I didn't know about that those cases. Yeah operation rough rider. That's interesting Yeah, they uh, uh, actually Gave a uh, there was a member that they tried to get on the The racketeering trial in 79 named big Albert Perryman And uh, big Al Was just like a larger in life figure And during that racketeering case with Mueller, he had been writing his girlfriend And telling her you got to wait for me, honey Uh, I'm going to be home in a couple years. I got millions of dollars hidden I got diamonds. I got rubies And he's writing home And the prison guys are intercepting open in the mail up, you know, copying it And then turning it over to the feds And it was interesting when we pulled the jury after the you know, the jury hung We pulled the jury and there was only one person They believed during the whole trial. They didn't believe any of the feds. They didn't believe any of the Our witnesses they didn't believe any of the u.s. Attorneys and they didn't believe any of the hell's angel defense attorneys The only person they believed was Albert Perryman. Albert gets up on the stand And uh He's a real jivey kind of a guy, you know, always wears a stingy brim hat and had it walked with a cane Always looking stylish And uh, so he gets up on the stand takes a stand and the u.s. Attorney Shows him the letters he goes he goes Isn't it true you said you had this and isn't it true you said that And he looked at the jury and he goes, of course I did he goes.  That's great And the jury that jury said that was the only guy they believed, you know Wow, I think it's the exact words were obviously you've never been to prison Wow Yeah, I just was I just googled some images of him and there's a there's a Photo here of him dressed like basically al Capone with the pinstripes and the Oh, yeah You know, it's it's funny. I do lectures sometimes and I'll show a picture of albert and I'll go, you know, here's a famous health angel. You know, he was uh, uh knifed And uh, he was shot And he did her all to himself. He shot himself. Oh, man once And uh, he went to put his knife back in the scabbard another time and it went right through his stomach Oh, man, he was he was quite a character I mean this guy would get on the dance floor and he'd have four or five of the most beautiful women dancing around him Oh, man he was uh He was your all-time health angel great. Is he going to be a um, well, maybe this is a good segue to talk about what you're up to now I mean, uh, george's uh prolific media personality here author Also has some tv projects in the works some tv projects that have already been accomplished And I know you have something in the works right now I'm not sure how much you want to talk about it But I'm wondering if maybe big al is going to be a character In in in your latest project, but I'm not sure how much you want to talk about that. Yeah Well, you know, I'm in the middle of uh, getting ready to go to pinewood studio in london And uh, they're building a soundstage there and uh, they're building a uh Street in the movie studio in spain will be going back and forth between the two Locations the replicating ventura of california and ohi california uh in these studios And uh, I wrote a book called mark and it's a fictionalized account Of the early days uh in the outlaw bike world And it's a fictionalized account of my life And instead of calling the club the hell's angels. I call them the question marks And after I uh did the outlaw chronicles on the history channel several high power people in the Industry saw it and saw how it became the surprise hit for the uh History channel it's great great documentary great documentary series by the way it's showed like five times around the world I mean, it's just always gets great. Uh, it's compelling. We were pulling in two million Viewers every time it showed. Yeah, so these guys saw that and uh They got ahold of my books And they asked me if I would be willing to take mark and update it to more of a afghanistan iraq uh time frame because it kind of starts out during the vietnam era in the original version And I said yeah, and uh, you know, like I said, I signed a deal. It's going to probably be a tv series of I'm not sure when it's going to uh debut it's probably end of this year or first the next year But I'm looking forward to leaving for uh, london and then spain Uh, I'm going to write the pilot with some other writers and I'm actually going to play old man john Uh In the series. Oh, that's awesome. I didn't I didn't mention that and so yeah, and he's the ideal be he'll he'll have some connection to the Chicago wise guys One of the storylines Is going to have uh The business of the marked uh motorcycle club in ventura county is going to be gambling And uh, if you look at some of the old, uh Clips, I should send them to you. I got some clips from the mid 80s and They're rating all the clubhouses in southern california because they say we're running a illegal gambling operation Uh And uh, you know, they never proved it, but you know, they made accusations.  There's a lot of a lot of bars nowadays.   They never proved anything, but we're going to take that and use it in the series, uh Oh, man, john's going to be friends with uh, tonia cardo type character. Oh, wow. I'll go, you know, tonia cardo retired in palm springs Oh, yeah, I didn't realize that in california. Well Yeah, so he retired in california and like in the series. Oh, man, john will be going out to uh Uh, this tonia cardo character and you know When then when the younger guy jack crest Gets in the club, uh Oh, man, john's going to teach him, uh, how to do all this stuff Uh, so it's going to be all be part of the series. Have you have you cast have they cast that that character? Yeah, that's going to be the character based on you someone. Am I understanding? Well, yeah They were talking about some people and I I can't say okay The streaming company is huge. They got 40 million subscribers so you can figure out Okay, who it is They just don't they want to control They want to control all the pr. Sure. I understand that yeah, so that I'm I've signed a mda I can't I can't tell you who it is, but it's and you know what once this thing breaks, uh, and you guys if you see it Uh, maybe we'll do this again. Yeah, no fantastic. You just read my mind. Yeah, we have to give you back I'd love to talk about uh, how the whole thing came down because there's some real high power people in the entertainment business that, uh Really love the outlaw chronicles and one of their concerns was We know this guy christie can deliver on the screen, but can we control this sort of a bit? They're about to find out, right? Yeah, exactly So how and and so how where can our audience find out more about you you you have a website or something? You'd like to share with us. George christie.com Or you can go to instagram george christie jr uh But if you go to george christie.com, it'll take you right to my instagram stuff and the new there's a big story I got the cover of a magazine this week. Uh, just came out today And there's a uh Story, I think I sent that story to yeah. Yes. I read it. Yeah. Yeah, that's that story that story is on my website It has a lot of information about the new show the forthcoming show Yeah, and you know, I've I've got uh, you know my book exile on front street and my book marked And I'm halfway through the second volume of mark. It's called marked up And uh, I'm going to stick to the uh, to the original book format And what's going to happen is uh, you know jack crest has established himself in the outlaw bike world he's kind of taken over uh as leader of this fictitious club and uh Now, uh The fun's gonna start for him and I'll wind up in a you know underground war and Oh Kind of follows my whole lifestyle. Yeah, so that's fantastic. So make sure uh, please visit his website buy his books check out his tv shows I believe you can purchase an autographed Book as well from your site. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, you there's autograph books And I can't keep up with these guys all the stuff they're doing and I think it's gonna get You know, it's gonna get wilder As the show gets closer, you know, well, we're gonna uh, we have to wrap up here, uh, george Um, we we greatly appreciate your time. Um Fascinating story. We look forward to all your different projects And uh, thanks for visiting the og podcast I have had a blast you guys. I really appreciate it. I hope we can do it again


So a key part of providing security mechanisms is to use encryption or in general cryptography cryptographic techniques. So we want to talk about what is encryption especially and what other techniques are used to implement our different security services. I think you've all heard of encryption, you've probably some of you may have deliberately used it, maybe encrypted a file and you indirectly use it or you use it on a regular basis when you use a number of network protocols. HTTPS for example accessing a secure web server encrypts your data before it's sent. So in this course we'll not look at the details of how encryption algorithms work but instead just say well what do we mean by encryption? List some of the different algorithms available and present some of the trade-offs and types of attacks. Encryption is used for different security techniques. The key one or I would avoid saying key, the important one is confidentiality. So let's start with that. How do we keep data secret? Encrypt that data. So our aim is to take our confidential information, our message and make sure that unauthorized individuals cannot read that message. That's what data confidentiality is. The way that we do that is we take that confidential information, encrypt it and we'll use an algorithm, an encryption algorithm such that anyone can see the encrypted data. We don't care who sees the encrypted data but the algorithm should be so that only authorized people can decrypt to find the original data and the authorized people will be identified with the use of keys, secret keys for example. Encryption is used for data confidentiality of information being sent across a network. We say sometimes in transit the data is sent across a network but also for data at rest, data stored on a disk for example. So the same concepts are used.  Anyone who accesses my hard disk cannot get the original file unless they have the key. Similar, I want to send a data across a network, I encrypt it before I send it. Anyone who intercepts that message like we did with Wi-Fi can see the encrypted message but cannot decrypt it unless they have the key. The same approach is used whether it's saved on a disk or sent across a network. Most of the examples we'll use will be sending across a network. So a simple model is that we think there are two users, the two normal users, A and B. A wants to send a message to B. And A and B want this message to be confidential. That means that when A sends a message to B we don't want anyone else in the world to be able to read that message except B. Of course A can read the message, they create it. And for anyone else in the world we'll represent as just one other user, an attacker, user C in this case. What we'll assume, so user A, their computing device, generates the message and will send something to user B, we will assume that some other user, user C in this case who's performing an attack, can intercept anything sent between A and B. Somehow they can intercept. Somehow they may be that they do the attack on Wi-Fi link. Or somehow maybe they simply go to the computer and get a copy of a file. Or they tap into a wired link or get access to an intermediate device like a router. But the assumption is somehow the attacker can intercept anything sent between A and B. Therefore we can't send the original message between A and B because it will not be confidential. So what we do is we encrypt the message before we send it. User A has the original message that they want to send to B. We refer to that message as plain text. It doesn't have to be text, it can be any format but the name we give this original message is plain text. And what we do before we send that is we encrypt it. We apply an algorithm, an encryption algorithm or a cipher and it takes as an input the plain text and we use a key to encrypt and the output of that algorithm is what we call the cipher text. And it's the cipher text that A sends to B and the encryption algorithm will be chosen such that there's a corresponding decryption algorithm where when user B receives the cipher text they take that as an input, they have a key and they apply the decryption algorithm such that it will produce the original plain text as output. That's the idea. So a couple of points on that normal process. The encryption and decryption algorithms used at A and B go together. That is they're related. Sometimes they're even the same algorithm. They must have the property that if we encrypt a plain text message to get cipher text, if we decrypt that cipher text using the correct key, we must get the original plain text. So the algorithms must return the original plain text. They cannot return something different otherwise they don't work. And the algorithms take as an input a key. In this picture I say that the encryption uses key one and decryption uses key two. They may not be different keys. They may be the same values. So key one and key two may be the exact same value. In some schemes they are the same. In other schemes they are different. From the attacker's perspective the attacker can intercept anything that A sends to B, in this case the cipher text. The attacker wants to find the plain text. That's their aim. They can easily obtain the cipher text. If you have the cipher text you can try and decrypt that cipher text. And this assumes that the attacker knows the algorithm used for encryption and decryption and that will be a common assumption. The attacker knows how we did the encryption and decryption. So assuming the attacker knows the decryption algorithm and they know the cipher text, what do they need to get the plain text? What does the attacker need to get the plain text? They need key. The key two in this case. So an important part here is that key two must be kept secret. If the attacker knows key two in this scheme then they can decrypt very easily and get the plain text. So we'll talk about secret keys. Keys are normally kept secret. In this case user A and B may know the keys. They cannot tell anyone else otherwise the scheme fails. It's not secure. And later we'll talk about some different approaches of how to use secret keys. Even if the attacker doesn't know the key it should be practically impossible for the attacker to either find the key or find the plain text. And if we have an algorithm for encryption and decryption such that the attacker, given the cipher text, cannot find the plain text then we consider that algorithm strong or secure. And there are such algorithms that we consider secure. So we'll list some of them as we go through. So that's our general model for encryption. Encrypt the plain text using one key and the receiver decrypts the cipher text using a potentially different key. It may be the same. In most of the cases we'll see at the start it's in fact the same. Key one and key two are the same. So some terminology we've seen so far. Plain text is the original message. Cipher text is the encrypted or encoded message. Encryption is the process of converting plain text to cipher text, sometimes called encyphering. Decryption is the opposite. A key is used in the cipher or the encryption or decryption. What is a cipher? It's a particular algorithm we use for encryption and decryption. So this block of encryption and decryption we need to have an algorithm there and a cipher is one particular algorithm. Cryptography is the study of algorithms for encryption. So what algorithm do we use for encryption? Well people have studied many different algorithms and tried to work out which ones are best. That's cryptography. Crypt analysis is a study of the techniques for defeating those algorithms. How do we decrypt the cipher text without knowing the plain text or the key in fact should be listed there. So crypt analysis is about how to defeat the algorithms. Cryptography is about how to design new algorithms. Cryptology is a combination of those two areas. A common encryption approach that is used and has been used for many years, maybe thousands of years, is that the key used by both sides is the same. That is key one and key two are the same value. A encrypts the plain text with a key and the algorithm is designed such that it can only be decrypted, the cipher text can only be decrypted if the receiver has the same key. So the keys are the same on both sides. We say the keys are symmetric. We have symmetry between the keys and this is referred to as symmetric key encryption. Any questions yet? We have plenty of space in the front two rows. Symmetric key encryption involves using the same key at both sides. There's a single key is sometimes referred to as simply a secret key or a symmetric key or a shared key. That's one of the more common forms of encryption for confidentiality. We'll see another one later. So for symmetric key encryption, we need a good algorithm. We say a strong encryption algorithm. An algorithm such that if the attacker knows that algorithm and they know the cipher text, they cannot get the key or plain text. And we need that the sender and receiver know the key to be used and that they keep that key secret. If someone else discovers the key, they can easily decrypt. In the study or the analysis that we do, we'll assume that the cipher, that is the algorithm used, is known by the attacker. So the algorithm used to encrypt and to decrypt is known by everyone. The reason we assume that is it's usually easy for the attacker to find that even if they don't know it. And for example, the algorithm may be implemented in your operating system. And everyone knows you can guess which operating system the users are using and it doesn't take much to find out what algorithm they use to encrypt. So normally the cipher is assumed to be known. And at this stage we'll assume that the keys used by user A and B are known by A and B and not known by anyone else. That is they were distributed in some secure manner. That becomes a bit of an issue which will arise when we look at key management. How do we get the key from A to B? At this stage we'll assume that B knows the key that A is using. So what algorithms are used for encryption? How do they work? And again in this course we will not go into the details of those algorithms. We'll touch upon the principles and list some of the algorithms but not look at their designs. But basically encryption uses two main operations, substitution and transposition. And they're very simple. Substitution is you replace one character or one element with some other element. And we'll show a very quick example if we use the English language as our alphabet. And the example of substitution is you have a word you want to encrypt, then you replace one letter, the letter s with some other letter in the alphabet. And the algorithm defines which letter you replace it with. So that's the operation of substitution. And transposition is just rearranging elements. For example you have the letters s, t, e, v, e is the word you want to encrypt. Transposition is an operation that says rearrange those five letters. So maybe you get t, e, v, s, e. That's a transposition operation. And all, well, most ciphers that are used today, they're used today symmetric key ciphers, use a combination of substitution and transposition operations. But they don't just do a single substitution or a single transposition, they use a multiple steps, a substitution, a transposition and then repeat multiple stages. And they refer to as product systems. Let's give an example of those two operations. Very simple ciphers, not secure but easy to demonstrate. First one is the Caesar cipher. And the Caesar cipher is maybe 2,000 years old. And the general approach is that we take, let's say we're using English language as the English alphabet. All of our plain text messages contain characters from a to z. And let's keep it as lowercase only. Then when we have a plain text message with a Caesar cipher to encrypt it, we take each character in the plain text message and shift it k positions to the right, where k is the key. And that will produce our cipher text. So a quick example, everyone seems to be awake and listening. So I'll start with the hard examples, skip the simple ones. Instead of giving you an encryption, I'll give you a way to decrypt. Let's say I give you some cipher text. And here it is. Here's the cipher text. And I give you the key. The value of the key k is 3. In the Caesar cipher and the algorithm or the cipher we're using, there are different ciphers, in this case we're using what's called the Caesar cipher. The Caesar cipher to encrypt takes each letter and shifts 3 positions to the right when we use a key of 3. If the key was 4 it would shift 4 positions to the right. Shifting to the right means if you start with the letter a, shift 3 positions to the right, a to b to c to d. If you encrypt the letter a, the cipher text will be the letter d. Decryption should return the original plain text. Decrypt our cipher text. Decrypt it. Not encrypt in this case because I think you'll find encryption is easy. Everyone told me the quizzes were easy yesterday so we'll start with the hard ones. Decrypt that cipher text and find out what the plain text is. C, I use as a shortcut for the cipher text. K is the key. So what's the plain text? P. Anyone have the answer? Yep. How do you get the answer? Shift to the left to decrypt. If we encrypt plain text we say we shift to the right 3 positions. To get the original plain text back we take the cipher text and shift 3 positions to the left. So take the first cipher text letter v and then in the alphabet, you need to remember the English alphabet, go back 3 positions. What's 3 positions before v make it easier for you? There's the alphabet numbered, maybe a little bit easier. So if we have v go back 3 positions. S. So the first letter of plain text is S. We substitute one letter with another. So this is a substitution operation. And the rule for which letter do we substitute with is well 3 positions to the right to encrypt. It's the opposite. What do we have? v, w, v becomes S, w becomes t, h becomes e. Not so hard that one. So a very simple encryption algorithm or a cipher, called the Caesar cipher, which uses substitutions. Replace one letter with another. And the rule is by k positions, the shift is. If you change the key, you'll get a different output when you encrypt. So that was the original plain text. If we encrypted that plain text with a different key, say a key value of 4, we would get different cipher text. Or from the other perspective, if you decrypted this cipher text with a different key, you'll get different plain text. Let's try. What do we get if we used a key of 4 with the same cipher text? We shift 4 positions to the left to decrypt. R, S. So all we're doing is taking our v, shift at 4 positions to the left. 4. What else do we have? u. And if we used the key value of 4 and decrypted that cipher text, we would have got the plain text R, S, D, U, D. Now these are very short plain texts, but which one do you think is the correct one? Steve. So this is a principle that we'll see arise. When we encrypt something, some plain text with a key, we get cipher text. If you decrypt that cipher text with the correct key, that is the same key in this case, 3, you'll get plain text that makes sense that we can recognize. But if you decrypt that cipher text with the wrong key, it is the wrong key because I actually encrypted using the value of 3. If we use a key of 4, we'll get a plain text value which doesn't make sense. And we'll be able to recognize that. The attacker or the user will be able to recognize something went wrong here. I got cipher text, I decrypted with key 4, I get plain text message that doesn't make sense. But I know someone who encrypts a plain text message will start with a sensible plain text message. That will be a principle that comes up. Decrypting with the wrong key will say random characters and can be recognized as being incorrect. So that's an example of a substitution cipher. Any questions? The purpose of this example is not for you to really remember the cipher, the details are not important, but just to know that this is a substitution. A transposition is when we rearrange letters. We don't replace them from something in the alphabet, we just move them around. That is we take the plain text and move the letters inside the plain text. And a simple one that we'll use quickly is called the rail fence cipher where we have a plain text message and what we do is we write that over K rows. So a key again is K, that will be chosen, maybe 2 rows, 3 rows, more depending on the length. And the cipher text is obtained by reading row by row. That one we'll do just to quickly demonstrate. Let's say we have some plain text and for the demo it needs to be a little bit longer. So here's our plain text message I want to send and we'll choose a key. I want to encrypt that. I use a key. It doesn't have to be the same as the previous one. I'm going to use the same key, key of 3. We'll see why in a moment. But it could have been different. It could have been 4, 5, 2. There's some limits on it. So to obtain the cipher text what we do is we write this plain text in 3 rows. It doesn't have to be in diagonals but you'll see it's a little bit easier to read. H-E-L-L-O, hello. Tell me if I spell it wrong. I wrote it in 3 rows. Why? Because I chose a key of 3. And now the cipher text I read those rows. The cipher text from this encryption is H-L-T-E-C-I, the first row, then the second row and then the third row. So this is a different cipher called the railfan cipher. Very simple cipher for transpositions. This is a transposition cipher because all we're doing is rearranging the letters in the plain text. The set of letters in the cipher text is identical to the set in the plain text. We don't have any new letters in there. So there were two L's in the plain text, there were two L's in the cipher text. So it's just a rearrangement. Whereas with the Caesar cipher we substitute with other letters, potentially other letters. So that's the difference between substitution and transposition. Now these are two of the simplest ciphers and very insecure. They have a number of weaknesses. But that's not the point. The point is that the two operations are demonstrated. How would you break these ciphers? That is, if you're an attacker and you know the cipher text but you don't know the key, how would you find the plain text? Maybe starting with the railfan cipher. If you knew the value of the cipher text, what would you do to try and find the plain text? You don't know the key. You don't know it's three rows. What would you do? Guess what? Guess the key. So there may be a limited value of keys here. It's actually limited by the length of the plain text. If you have a very long plain text, you could, let's say we have a plain text of millions of letters, a very long document, then the number of keys, there are many possible keys. Maybe you can do better than just guessing the key. So yes, you could guess the key, decrypt, see if you get plain text that makes sense. If not, try another key. If not, another key. Can you do it better than that? Write a program. What would your program do? Guess the keys. I want to be smarter than guessing the keys. Not necessarily faster, smarter. Well, turns out that you could look for some patterns in the cipher text based on your knowledge of English and your knowledge that certain characters go together. In English, it's not very often that you have T followed by L in a word. So you could start to look at the expected pairs of letters of the plain text and the expected frequency of letters, especially when you have very long plain text. So if you know something about the patterns of letters that you expect in the plain text, you can actually do analysis and instead of guessing from all the possible keys, you can try just a few and eventually you'll find the plain text. This one's not so hard because it's quite small to guess. Similar to with a Caesar cipher. Yes, you could try all possible keys. How many possible keys are there with this Caesar cipher? How many keys would you try if you had to try them all? We said the Caesar cipher shifts by K positions. What's the largest value of K that we can have? 25 or 26 maybe. That is, you can have K as large as you like, but if K, well think, if K is zero, shift by zero positions, take your plain text, shift by zero positions mean don't shift. The cipher text and the plain text will be the same. That's not very good but it's a possible key. If K is one, shift by one position, if it's two or we did with three, if it's 26, shift, start with the letter A, shift 26 positions to the right and you actually come back to the letter A, which is the same as shifting by zero positions. 27 is the same as shifting by one position. So in fact, with the Caesar cipher there are only 26 possible different keys. So an attacker just has to try all those 26 values. One of them will give them the right plain text. That's called a brute force attack. But again, there are more intelligent attacks and if you analyze, especially with long cipher text, if you analyze the structure of the number of letters, the number of pairs of letters or diagrams, you can quickly do an attack to defeat this cipher. The last thing to demonstrate, we will not demonstrate, but to make ciphers stronger, we saw an example of a substitution cipher and a transposition cipher. Real ciphers in use today don't use those but they use the same principles of substitutions and transpositions and what they do is they have multiple steps. They do a substitution, then a transposition, then another substitution and another transposition and they have it in multiple stages or rounds they're called such that they do it enough times, then it's very, very hard, practically impossible for an attacker to go from the cipher text and work back and get the plain text. So that's what a product system does. We will not go through the example but basically apply the Caesar cipher on your plain text and then apply the rail fence cipher to mix up the letters and then apply the Caesar cipher again and then apply the rail fence cipher again and eventually after multiple applications you'll get a cipher text and it can be seen that that cipher text is very hard to work back to get the plain text without guessing the key and that's the principle that many ciphers are built on today. The attention of those examples is not for you to have to remember those ciphers but understand some of the basic principles of real ciphers. So we saw something about the attacks that can take place. What does the attacker want to do? They want to find the plain text if they only know the cipher text and the algorithm being used they want to find the plain text or the key. Finding the key is often considered better than finding the plain text because if I find the key I can decrypt any subsequent cipher text very easily but in most ciphers today if you can find the plain text or the key it means that algorithm is considered insecure. So if an attacker can take the cipher text and the algorithm and find plain text or key then that's not a good algorithm. We assume the attacker knows the cipher text, they know the algorithm being used, they know if it's the Caesar cipher, if it's the rail fence cipher or something else and in practice they usually know other pairs of plain text cipher text but not the key but was encrypted using the same key. That is the attacker may know that in the past someone took this plain text message, they encrypted it with a cipher with a key and got this cipher text. The attacker knows the pair of plain text and cipher text but they don't know the key and there are ways to get that information and therefore the attacker works with that to try and work back and find the plain text or the key and there are two approaches and we sort of saw them in the previous examples. Try every possible key, it's called a brute force attack. That's the dumb approach but work sometimes but very easy to defend against by making sure that they need to try many possible keys such that it takes too long. The smart approach from the attacker is do some analysis on the cipher text, the algorithm, to try and work out what the plain text or key is but that requires good knowledge of the algorithm and finding weaknesses in the algorithm. That's hard. We will see shortly some statistics or performance of attacks on real algorithms with respect to brute force and crypt analysis. Let's focus specifically now about symmetric key encryption which we've mentioned. Symmetric key encryption is commonly used for confidentiality. The same model before, we take our plain text, I've just introduced some shorthand notation, plain text P, we encrypt it with an algorithm and we take as an input a key K. We get cipher text, we can write it mathematically, we apply the function E as inputs to the key K and the plain text P and as the output we get cipher text and then the receiver decrypts that cipher text using the same key. It's the same value of K here and the algorithms must be designed such that when you decrypt that same cipher text using the same key you'll get the original plain text P. This is called symmetric key encryption because both sides use the same key. Symmetry amongst the key, it's often called a shared secret key or a shared key. A later approach will see that they use different keys. The algorithm used for encryption should be good, we say it should be strong. Strong means that if an attacker knows the algorithm they know cipher text and they even know pairs of plain text cipher text, they should not be able to find the plain text or key within reasonable time and the other requirement here is that the key is known by both sides A and B and is not known by anyone else. If I say it's a secret key and someone else knows it then it's not secret. So we assume no one else knows the key. So we saw a very quick example of the CESA cipher and the railfan cipher, they are not used. They are just to show how to do something on paper. What algorithms are used for encryption and decryption in the past and today? That's what the next few slides will list, just the names of some of the ciphers used so you're aware of them. One of the first and maybe most one of the widely used ciphers in the world was called the data encryption standard, DES, DES. So that was the algorithm for doing the encryption and decryption. Designed in the 1970s, come from IBM and the NSA in the US and became a standard in the US government and therefore widely used in many different countries. The details of it we're not going to cover, maybe pick up on some important things. It used a key length of 56 bits. So our real ciphers that we used today are not operating on letters, A, B, C and D, they're operating on binary values. So our ciphers operate on a sequence of binary values and the keys are measured in bits, so a binary value. So with DES, the effective key length was 56 bits. It was actually 64 bits but eight of them were known or of no relevance to the encryption. And that will be, that was an important or a significant limitation of the cipher as we'll see in a moment. The key size was insecure. So DES was one of the earlier and widely used ciphers but it had a limitation in that the key length was too small and therefore new ciphers have been developed over time. Before we look at them, let's just simply do an encryption with DES. This is just a summary of the DES algorithm. The point of this picture isn't for you to know how it works but to show that it's quite complex compared to the Caesar cipher. Do K positions to the right? Well, that's easy. DES involves very hard to see but involves 16 rounds. 16, we do something, we do it again and we do it again 16 times. And each round involves things like, because it's operating on bits, doing left shifts, shifting the bits to the left, doing permutations. Permutations is another word for transposition. Rearranging bits, moving one bit to this position and the other bit to another position and doing substitutions. It uses S boxes as the concept. The point is that even though it's a very complex cipher compared to the others, it uses the same principles of transpositions, substitutions, one after the other and repeats them all again in the second round and repeats them all again and considered to be a secure design. We cannot go through examples on the board. I'll simply show one using a computer. Let me encrypt a file just to demonstrate. The plain text message I'm going to encrypt is here. So it actually finishes at this point. I've just created a text file. That's our message that we want to encrypt. That's the plain text that no one else should be able to read. And what I'm going to do is just use some software to encrypt it. We're going to use DES and actually before we look at that plain text message, what DES does is it operates on a set of bits at a time. It encrypts a block of bits and then encrypts the next block of bits in that original plain text and it works on 64 bits at a time. DES uses what's called a block size of 64 bits. So if your plain text message is 128 bits, DES encrypts the first 64 bits and then separately encrypts the second 64 bits. If it's not a model of 64 that it can add some padding to make it a model. So the ciphers that are used in practice today use a fixed size block, usually small in terms of 64 bits or 128 bits. How long is our message? Our message is 72 bytes long. DES does not operate on characters. It operates on binary values, on bits. How many bits in this file? It's 72 bytes or 72 characters. With ASCII encoding we represent in our file system, we represent every character with an 8-bit value. Let me zoom out and try that again because it wraps around. That's better. So this is the actual file but in the binary form. The values are not important but just to make it clear that this is the first 8 bits represent the letter uppercase H. So what DES does is takes 64 bits at a time, encrypts it and then produces ciphertext and then does it again for the next 64 bits. So let's encrypt using DES, the data encryption standard and the software I'm going to use to encrypt is called OpenSSL. It's just some freely available software that implements many different encryption algorithms. I'm going to encrypt and the algorithm is actually called DES ECB, just the mode of DES. Minus E to encrypt and we take as an input a file, a message file and we're going to produce as an output some ciphertext, just another file and remember to encrypt you take the plain text as input minus in, message 1 is the plain text so it's the contents of the file will be encrypted and it's going to produce ciphertext as output and also we need a key as input and I'll specify the key using a minus K value and what key value should I use to encrypt? How should I choose a key? What would I choose? 1, okay. What's better than 1? 0 maybe. Alright this software requires a particular length key but let's use 0. 16 zeros, they are actually given in hexadecimal here. 16 zeros is equivalent to how many bits? 16 hex zeros, 1 hex digit is 4 bits. So this is a 64 bit key but I just given it in hexadecimal, it's hard to me to get 64 bits. It's not a good key, we'll talk about a good key later. Now not so important but we also need some initial value here and I'll make it the same. That's the nature of this algorithm, we need to initialize some value and we don't have any padding in this case, no padding. The key points, I'm going to use desk, I'm going to encrypt my message, I'm going to produce ciphertext, that file and this is the key value I'm going to use but given in hexadecimal. There, it just encrypted, produces some ciphertext, we'll have a look in a moment. The ciphertext file is 72 bytes. The plaintext file is also 72 bytes. The encryption algorithm should take our plaintext and produce the same length ciphertext. It doesn't add anything extra, assuming there's no padding necessary or always produce, take 64 bits in and produce 64 bits out. Let's look at the ciphertext. I have to zoom out of it. To look at the ciphertext I'll look at it in a binary format, almost done. That's our plaintext, that's our original message and now the ciphertext. What do you expect to see? Well, here's our set of bits. Look at the ASCII encoding. This software shows the actual binary value in the middle, those eight columns in the middle and at the right hand side it shows the corresponding ASCII encoding. The plaintext message was our hello, this is our super secret message. When we get the ciphertext it has some random looking ASCII characters. The dot means it's an unprintable ASCII character. Some ASCII characters you can't print on the screen. It's not a letter, like backspace and so on. Escape. Do you see any structure in the plaintext message? Look at the sequence of eight bits. What about this pair of these two pairs of eight bits? They are the same. Why are they the same? Because they represent the letter L. L repeats. This is L and L in hello. In fact you see an E here and if you look through you'll probably see the same sequence of eight bits here, the E in super. There's some structure in the plaintext. It's hard to see but if you look closely you'll find that there's no structure in the ciphertext. If you look at these bits there's no obvious structure in there and it's effectively random. And that's the sign of a good cipher. A good encryption algorithm takes your plaintext which is in some structure and produces ciphertext which is effectively random, random looking output. And DESC does that in fact. DESC is a good algorithm in terms of producing random looking output. And the random looking output means that when an attacker gets this ciphertext there's no practical way for them to, if they don't have the key, to work back and get the original plaintext. Because if you take something random you cannot find any structure to find some hints to the plaintext. So the ciphers we use today effectively produce a random output. If you want to attack this ciphertext and find the plaintext if you didn't know the key what would you do? If you didn't know the key and you knew the ciphertext what would you do to find the plaintext? What type of attack? Before we go home today let's answer this. What are you going to do if you want to find the plaintext? Brute force. Good. Brute force. Try all possible keys. How many keys are there? 26. This is not the Caesar cipher. The key length is 64 bits. Effectively 56 bits. Eight aren't used. With 56 bits how many possible keys are there? Two to the power of 56 possible keys. So you need to try two to the power of 56 possible keys. So by making the key length large a brute force attack becomes ineffective for most people. But it turns out 56 bits is still not long enough. It takes a few hours nowadays to try 56 bit keys. So next week we'll look at brute force attacks and look at the limits of what's possible and look at some other ciphers.


In my country, the biggest challenges to tax policy are, one, I think we have a high informal sector that is not taxed. Second is that most of the business owners are not educated to understand the tax complexities. The government and our tax revenue authority should increase its taxpayer education, encouraging taxpayers to come out and pay taxes, register them, and to tell them the benefits of going formal. This has been an intense program but very educative. As a matter of fact, this has been one of the best experiences. The professors here are very, very good and they have been able to give us the academia side plus the research side. We have met academia and research in the intersection. One of the things we have gained is the network. We have been able to get in touch with the professors now easily, especially if you have a challenge with any tax policy, any tax research. As a result of this winter school, you will see some good research ideas coming out very soon.


The Zamfara State Police Command has arrested eight people suspected to be supplying ammunition, military uniforms, motorcycles and foodstuff to bandits in the state. Some of the arrested suspects were also said to have successfully negotiated and delivered several sums of ransom from families to the kidnappers for a commission. The Command's Public Relations Officer, S.P. Mohamed Shehu, told Newsman in Gooseau that the suspects were arrested by the Police Tactical Squad in Gooseau and Safei local government areas. Shehu said five of the suspects specialized in providing information supplying military camouflage and ammunition to the bandits. You can see how these people are conniving, are collaborating, are becoming dangerous more dangerous to the people of Zamfara State and even beyond. You can see how they are making the nefarious activities of these bandits easier because without them, these bandits cannot operate successfully. Without them, these bandits cannot have the access, the information on who and who to kidnap and where and where to attack. Without them, the bandits cannot have the opportunity to carry out their activities because they are getting supply of motorcycles and everybody knows that is true, that motorcycle, these bandits are carrying out their activities. They are also the one repairing their motorcycle aid supply. So we want to use this opportunity to appeal to members of the public to continue to collaborate with us by flourishing out, by giving information to the police and other security agencies on activities of this informant because their activities is the most dangerous activities. If we can arrest them, if we can stop them from carrying out their activities our state, Zamfara State, even the neighboring state will live in peace.