A Few More Words About Secret Writing

OK so I liked the essay on secret writing, it cleared some things up for me. I liked that he says that no human can produce a cipher that cannot be solved by another human, but also acknowledges that not all of us think on that level, I think he was talking about me in that statement! I can't focus on those kinds of things long. However, I did have a notebook with my best friend in middle school in which we would write in code language so that our parents wouldn't know what we were talking about (not that we were talking about bad things just boys and who we didn't like that week and other stuff). I guess we just thought it was cool. Poe brings out a new/old reason for secret writing which is for the communication between two individuals that are trying to literally keep things secret. I wish he would have given more examples as to when people would have used these ciphers, like what would be said in them and so on. "It is not to be supposed that Cryptography, as a serious thing, as the means of imparting important information, has gone out of use at the present day. It is still commonly practised in diplomacy; and there are individuals, even now, holding office in the eye of various foreign governments, whose real business is that of deciphering. We have already said that a peculiar mental action is called into play in the solution of cryptographical problems, at least in those of the higher order. Good cryptographists are rare indeed; and thus their services, although seldom required, are necessarily well requited." I like that he associates intelligence with being about to crack the codes here in this quote. He also addresses that there are not many who can accomplish the complex ones. I am thinking again about the National Treasure movies becuase Nicholas Cage is beast at solving those ciphers. I was basically jsut wondering if there are any instances in which codes and ciphers are still used today. I can't think of any along the lines of what Poe was describing, the only ones I can think of are ones just for fun like puzzles in the news paper and puzzle books people do on vacation.