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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (135748)	6/5/2004 3:07:23 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Re: Chalabi and the Iranian code. I was just reading a review of a book about the Enigma machines, and remembered conversations I used to have with a former CIA codebreaker. He's about my age, quit working for the CIA after - his explanation - he was lying on the beach on vacation one day, looking up at clouds in the sky, and all of a sudden thought of a way to generate an unbreakable code. I helped represent him in a patent dispute. He loved to talk about codes. Code writers and code breakers are obsessed with codes. His boss, who was the chief code writer for the CIA, wrote a message on a statue in the CIA building that, rumor has it, has never been broken. He says that any code can be broken, but some are so hard to break that you have to really, really want to know what's in the message. This was almost ten years ago, maybe the technology has changed. There are algorithms which are used for generating codes, and the sender and the recipient have "keys" that only they share - there are "public keys" and "private keys." Most of the key systems have a function where the code changes for every message, but the encryption algorithm does not. The encryption algorithms have "holes" built into them, that our intelligence knows, and can exploit, but others don't. So he said, for whatever it is worth. In time, I came to believe his boss was smarter than he was, but that's neither here nor there. Maybe it was a case of "old age and treachery will always win out over youth and skill."