I expect 99.9% of you to be baffled by crypto change time. I know you associate HJ with The Hero’s Journey. For me, it means a different kind of Hero’s Journey. Early in my military career, I was a secure communications technician. This was back in the days when we had to perform manual crypto key changes. Well, I didn’t. I was the technician not the operator. But the widely-used acronym for the process of changing the cryptographic key was HJ. As in, “It’s HJ time” I think I heard what the term meant, but I don’t remember it, and with modern digital cryptographic gear and over-the-air keying, the need to manually change a card or a paper tape or punch blocks is ancient history. If you want to learn more about that kind of stuff, go to the National Cryptologic Museum site or visit the museum if you’re in the Baltimore-Washington area of the US.
But does it tie in with this course or the Hero’s Journey? I think so. We’re changing our key material as a result of this course. We came to the course with most of us looking without for the keys to life, and we’re finding this new-fangled technology that reveals the key is within. We had it all the time. We’re learning to do over-the-air rekeying and system resets. We all have our individual codes, but the common key is the Universal Mind.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be tapping into our newfound abilities. We’re learning to execute without an operator, and we’ll be testing our circuits. Have we completed them? Do we know how? You bet we do. Will we do so imperfectly? Of course. Practice and improvement is a lifelong process, but we won’t be stumbling as much as we were when we started the course.