course that the US Navy had developed to train its cryptographers. To train its cryptanalysts and code breakers. And they would come to Washington DC-- this first cohort of women who would train all during their senior year, at the same time that they
And I read this quote from Max Hastings and thought, I bet somebody very, very, very clever and very capable has written that book about every single thing the Germans were doing in terms of cryptanalysis for before the Second World War. And I realized that nobody had.
and you don't want to have the kind of collateral damage. And what I mean by the cryptapocalypse-- so cryptography involves math that is hard.
And for 40 years, since the mid-1970s when Enigma and the story of Ultra first came out and was declassified by the government, we've all followed the astounding successes in intelligence cryptanalysis history and secrecy of Bletchley Park and what they did. It was an amazing triumph.
And this is what they were operating in, in Germany. They knew that half of the German Wehrmacht High Command cryptanalytical documents, machinery had been dumped into an Austrian lake. Which lake, when, how, how deep?
They did nothing about it. They used that straight into the entire Romanian cryptanalytical infrastructure, cracked every single Romanian code on the basis of that and knew that the Romanians would
Were the Americans doing it the other way around? Wilhelm Tranow, the crack naval cryptanalyst, you read every single page of information you can find in the world about that man, and at the end, the Americans didn't know how he did it.
They did nothing about it. And the whole story started from there, and it became the story of cryptanalysis and the whole of the Cold War and the face-off
and you don't want to have the kind of collateral damage. And so to transition into another case study, the cryptapocalypse, and I have to go a little bit faster here.
from the Brooklyn College library. On the blank sides of her homemade index cards, like a cryptanalyst unraveling a cypher, Kober notated in her tiny hand every possible statistic about every character of Linear B in every inscription then known-- a character's frequency at the beginnings of words, the middles of words, the ends of words, its frequency in
You've got to get it right, especially if you're doing it the first time. So I had to look around and realize that nobody had done it, apart from two extremely capable cryptanalysis, one of whom had their own blog, which is complex to say the least.
They did nothing about it. every single day. And her information would be passed to the foreign ministers of the different parts of the German cryptanalytical community.
My other favorite thing about Shannon's childhood is he mentioned that his favorite story growing up was the Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug." Which I don't know if anyone's read it, but I looked into it, and it's the only Edgar Allen Poe story that ends with this lecture on cryptanalysis about this giant block of text that's a buried treasure code from a pirate.
And it's been a crazy year, man, and I just want to give you a flavor for how crazy it's been for what's going on. And what I want to do is talk a little bit about the FBI and backdoors, the NSA and what we call the cryptapocalypse, and then novel technologies like drones.
Using Bayes' rule and Bans, Turing began calculating credibility values for various kinds of hunches and compiling reference tables of Bans for technicians to use. It was a statistic-based technique, produced no absolute certainties, but when the odds of a hypothesis added up to 50 to one, cryptanalysts could be close to certain that they were right." Now, Turing was obviously developing a home grown Bayesian system. No one knows where he got it, whether he discovered it and developed it on his own, with his assistant Jack Good,