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Tale of a Would-Be Spy, Buried Treasure, and Uncrackable Code
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mouser:
Another nice real life spy story:
When officials searched the aspiring spy, they found a paper tucked under the insole of his right shoe. On it were written the addresses of several Iraqi and Chinese embassies in Europe. In a trouser pocket they discovered a spiral pad in which Regan, who had been trained in cryptanalysis by the Air Force, had written 13 seemingly unconnected words — like tricycle, rocket, and glove. Another 26 words were written on an index card. In his wallet was a paper with a string of several dozen letters and numbers beginning “5-6-N-V-O-A- I …” And in a folder Regan had been carrying, they found four pages filled with three-digit numbers, or trinomes: 952, 832, 041, and so on. The spiral pad, the index card, the wallet note, and the sheets of trinomes: The FBI suddenly had four puzzles to solve.
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http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_hideandseek/
housetier:
First, hooray for wired having a "full page" link, so I do not have to go through hoops to read the whole article.
Second, it was interesting to read. Very exciting with real FBI agents and such. I did not look, but do you know if they released all of Regan's ciphertexts for hobby cryptographers to decode? I might find the time to try to crack it myself ;)
Neal Stephenson also uses various encryption methods in his book "Cryptonomicon" which I can highly recommend.
Deozaan:
Another nice real life spy story:-mouser (February 07, 2010, 11:59 PM)
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Another? Where is/are the other(s)?
Very interesting read.
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