Have you ever had someone say to you: “Y0u 5u<k d0|\||<3y b4115.” ?

How did that make you feel? Were you confused? Do you really have any idea what they just implicated your involvement in? Did you know that if that statement is true there’s a good chance you’ve broken the law in every state but Alabama?

1337 Speak, or 1337 5p34|<, is the act of replacing letters in your sentences with numbers or symbols. It’s a little known fact but this act was actually started long, long ago, before Boston Legal was on the air. It was the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln needed to send a message deep into the South to some of his undercover agents. The message contained crucial battle strategies and would need to be encrypted to the highest degree. Edwin Stanton was truly the founder of it all. He determined that the best way to encode their message would be to use characters the inhabitants of the south could not possibly understand, numbers. And so 3 replaced E, 5 replaced S, 4 replaced A, and so on. The message was a success. Though the convoy carrying it was intercepted and massacred it is said that the message was immediately taken to Jefferson Davis who furrowed his brow at the nonsensical madness and promptly threw the message away.

Now fast forward to the year 1978. A largely unknown member of congress by the name Al Gore connected two computers together using some general household objects. This was a revolutionary breakthrough as up until that very point nobody had thought to connect computers to one another. The ability to share information between the two machines was astounding and soon other computers were plugged into the very same infrastructure. And so the internet was born. Except back then they called it the “ARPANET”. That name would later be copyrighted by some jerk and the name would be changed to the much less popular choice of “Internet”

Now being that Mr. Gore was part of the federal government, it was only natural that he would begin to use this Arpanet to transmit high class secrets such as, alien abductions, the president’s favorite recipes, and the secret code that could be entered into Elvis Pressley’s cryogenic sleeping tube located deep within Fort Knox. It wasn’t long however before Al noticed something quite unseemly. Following an extension cord he found plugged into the back of his system. Al uncovered what is assumed to be the world’s first hacker. Cleverly hidden in Al’s bathroom, the hacker had been writing down all of the classified information being transferred back and forth and was mailing the papers to his friend in Connecticut who owned a dot-matrix printer. The two planned to print a newspaper, mind you it would print very slowly and they could really only make one copy every half hour or so, but the truth had to be revealed to the American people.

After a dramatic sword fight Al vanquished the hacker and immediately raced in his car to the White House, where he would inform the President of the security breach. After dealing with the extremely distraught Jimmy Carter (who feared his fresh apple pie recipe could be exposed to the entire nation.) Al was offered the chance to spend the night in the White House while everyone tried to figure out what to do. While staying in the Lincoln bedroom Al pulled out a book from one of the shelves and was shocked to find a secret passage open up behind him. Al followed the passage deep into the underground and by candlelight found the only documentation left of 1337 speak.

The code was introduced to the Arpanet and was an immediate success. To increase the encryption to maddening levels symbols were added in replacement of letters alongside numbers. Jimmy Carter’s Fresh Apple Pie Recipe became: J1mmy C4r73r’5 Fr35h 4pp|3 P13 R3c1p3.

The code has remained in place for years and has been cracked by few. This language though sometimes used in jest by internet users is truly the one thing keeping our nation’s deepest darkest secrets from falling into the hands of our enemies.

Now I know what you're thinking. "How can I learn to to crack this code for fun and profit? Well we'll have to get back to that later because I'm afraid we've run out of time for today. So stay tuned code crackers.