The Secrecy of Freemasonry - Part 3

If all of the secrets that underpin society were to be made public, all hell would break loose. Just the other day, almost 10 billion passwords were leaked in what some call the biggest password leak in history. Not to mention, Shopify, the world’s leading e-commerce provider, was also subject to a data breach of 180,000 passwords as well as the names and emails of users.

In this final part of the series on the secrecy of Freemasonry, I will share

• What day-to-day secrets are hiding in plain sight

• How society can’t function without Secrets

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You may wonder why I mentioned the data leaks, to begin with. Well, it’s not because our passwords are hiding in plain sight, but rather, our user names and passwords are secrets, and they are secrets hiding in plain sight. Just as we as Freemasons use our secret handshakes and corresponding communications as means to identify each other, so too is your username and password used as a means to prove who you are and properly identify you— than to provide you access to the “secret knowledge” that lay behind your login.

But what secret knowledge does hide behind your usernames and passwords?

We’ve overused the bank account example so I won’t go into that; but would you let someone scroll through your Facebook or TikTok feed? Try it, let someone you don’t know scroll through your social media feeds, and no I am not talking about the feed you’ve shared, I mean your feed the one you see. Let someone access your email account and just read your emails. That’s secret knowledge you don’t want others to know.

But what sits underneath a username and password to a service?

Trust.

When you provide a username and password the service provider trusts that you are the one who is duly authorised to access the account. But given how easy it is to hack passwords to access data leaks, we now have things like two-factor authentication that send you a disposable code for that attempt to log in. These things are what make up an agreement or, fun fact the technical term, a hand-shake between the two parties to ensure authorised access.

That’s not all. Your employment contract, payslips, your company’s intellectual property, the proprietary code that runs your smartphone, the 11 secret herbs and spices, the Coca-Cola recipe, the Pepsi recipe, Meemaw’s Brisket recipe, the financial results of any listed business before their public release. These are all examples of esoteric or secret knowledge that we as a society need to function.

I will give you one more example.

When you buy something online or even at the store, to authorise the transaction your credit card number, expiry and cvn need to be transmitted to the server that decides to approve the transaction or not. But how do we do that?

That padlock on your internet browser shows there is an SSL certificate that encrypts your connection so your details can’t be intercepted. When you put your credit card details in online and hit buy— they get “encrypted” and only the sender and receiver know the key to decrypt them.

So as you can see, we have secrets that are hiding in plain sight, and which without them, society wouldn’t function.