The sculpture remained unsolved until 1992, when Adm.
Over the next year, the CIA tried to crack the sculpture on its own, but with no success. In December 1991 a group of NSA analysts met in a conference room at the NSA to discuss the sculpture and what methods of decryption they might apply, including classified methods used internally by the NSA.Ī memo about this meeting indicates that "any discussion of 'in-house' techniques or applications (being classified) are not mentioned in this text as it is to be unclassified." The memo also included a note to participants not to discuss their efforts to crack the puzzle in public, as some of the methods they used might be classified, as well as a message at the bottom of the memo indicating that "these notes were prepared at NO expense to the US Government."Īfter that initial NSA meeting, however, nothing further was done on the puzzle. In 1991, while on a trip to the CIA, a group of NSA cryptanalysis "interns" diligently scribbled all the letters from the sculpture onto sheets of paper and brought them back to the NSA so curious analysts there could take a crack at it. One of the memos notes that the layout of the two-part sculpture was "a landscaping scheme designed to recall the natural stone out-cropping that existed on the site before the Agency, and that will endure as do mountains." The placement of the sculpture "in a geologic context reinforces the text's 'hidden-ness' as if it were a fossil or an image frozen in time." The latter, which is the more famous part of Kryptos, was inscribed with four encrypted messages composed from some 1,800 letters carved out of the copper plate.
#Declassified cia papers crack code#
Sanborn completed the two-part sculpture in 1990, which included stones laid out in International Morse code near the front entrance of the CIA campus, and a 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and petrified wood sculpture. It all began in 1988 when the CIA Fine Arts Commission commissioned local artist James Sanborn to create a cryptographic sculpture for a courtyard on the CIA campus.
#Declassified cia papers crack cracked#
Although a Baltimore Sun story about Kryptos in 2000 disclosed that the NSA had cracked three sections of the puzzle, many of the details behind the efforts were not revealed.
0 kommentar(er)
