WEBVTT - How Does Historical Cryptology Work?

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<v Speaker 1>Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brains to

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<v Speaker 1>Floor and Vogelbomb. Here. From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt

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<v Speaker 1>to the warring kingdoms of medieval Europe, humans have had

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<v Speaker 1>plenty of good reasons to send secret messages. If you

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<v Speaker 1>wanted to keep military plans from the enemy or keep

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<v Speaker 1>an illicit affair from your partner, you wrote it down

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<v Speaker 1>as a cipher. That is, a coded message that can

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<v Speaker 1>only be unlocked by someone possessing the key. Before the

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<v Speaker 1>computer age, if a historian came across a coded message

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<v Speaker 1>and an archive of material, they would usually skip over

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<v Speaker 1>it because it just wasn't worth the trouble. Even ancient

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<v Speaker 1>ciphers can be nearly impossible to crack with just a

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<v Speaker 1>pencil and paper. But what juicy historical secrets were trapped

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<v Speaker 1>in those ancient puzzles. For the article this episode is

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<v Speaker 1>based on, has Stuff Works spoke with Craig P. Bauer,

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<v Speaker 1>a math professor at York College of Pennsylvania and editor

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<v Speaker 1>in chief of the journal Cryptologia. He said, if you're

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<v Speaker 1>looking through a diary and you come across a passage

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<v Speaker 1>that's enciphered, you know that's the best part. When a

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<v Speaker 1>message can't be read, the sky's the limit. It can

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<v Speaker 1>be absolutely anything. It can resolve a historic mystery or

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<v Speaker 1>shed new light on the personality of a historic figure.

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<v Speaker 1>Maybe history itself is rewritten, and Bower should know. His

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<v Speaker 1>journal made history in February of twenty twenty three by

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<v Speaker 1>publishing the work of three amateur codebreakers who decrypted a

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<v Speaker 1>trove of secret letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots.

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<v Speaker 1>The encoded letters date to the fifteen hundreds, during Mary's

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<v Speaker 1>nineteen year imprisonment by Queen Elizabeth the First and show

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<v Speaker 1>how Mary remained a shrewd political operative even while locked

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<v Speaker 1>away in a castle. The letters contain about fifty thousand

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<v Speaker 1>words of writing, enough to fill a book. Historians are

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<v Speaker 1>sure to be digging into them for a good while. Interestingly,

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<v Speaker 1>they're mostly addressed to the French ambassador to England at

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<v Speaker 1>the time, and indicate that Mary was directly or indirectly

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<v Speaker 1>in touch with many of the major players in Elizabeth's court.

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<v Speaker 1>The team that cracked the letters harnessed powerful codebreaking technology

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<v Speaker 1>that wasn't available even a decade ago, and those new

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<v Speaker 1>tools have ushered in what Bauer calls the Second Golden

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<v Speaker 1>age of decipherment. The question is what secrets will these

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<v Speaker 1>historical codebreakers uncover? Next, let's talk about historical cryptology. Cryptology

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<v Speaker 1>is the study of both writing and breaking codes. When

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<v Speaker 1>we think of cryptologists, we might picture someone like the

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<v Speaker 1>British mathematician Alan Turing, who cracked Nazi Germany's infamous Enigma

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<v Speaker 1>machine during World War Two. But cryptologists don't just work

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<v Speaker 1>for intelligence agencies. There are also amateur codebreakers who are

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<v Speaker 1>fascinated with solving historical puzzles. A Bower is one of them.

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<v Speaker 1>He wrote a book called Unsolved, The History and Mystery

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<v Speaker 1>of the World's Greatest Ciphers from Ancient Egypt to online

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<v Speaker 1>secret societies. In it, he cataloged some of the biggest

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<v Speaker 1>ciphers that historical cryptologists are itching to crack. The Zodiac

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<v Speaker 1>cipher used to be one of them. For fifty one years,

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<v Speaker 1>no one could solve the riddle of the three hundred

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<v Speaker 1>and forty character coded message written in nineteen sixty nine

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<v Speaker 1>by the infamous Zodiac Killer, and then a team of

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<v Speaker 1>amateur cryptologists cracked it in twenty twenty one using supercomputers

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<v Speaker 1>and custom decryption software. The killer's identity still remains a mystery,

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<v Speaker 1>though in recent years, historical cryptologists have broken ciphers created

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<v Speaker 1>by the KKK, Marie Antoinette, and the Masons. They even

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<v Speaker 1>figured out how to decrypt the infamous RAHNK Codex, an

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<v Speaker 1>ancient illustrated manuscript discovered in the eighteen thirties that's written

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<v Speaker 1>in an unknown language. A. Bauer is quick to point

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<v Speaker 1>out that it takes more than just raw computing power

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<v Speaker 1>to break an ancient code. He said, a good historical

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<v Speaker 1>cryptologist has to be part countant, able to very carefully

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<v Speaker 1>keep track of numbers and statistics, but they also need

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<v Speaker 1>to have the spirit of Mozart. You have to be

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<v Speaker 1>very creative and almost a psychologist to guess the keywords

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<v Speaker 1>or phrases to unlock the cipher. It requires a combination

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<v Speaker 1>of creativity, powerful computers, and persistence. If you lose one

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<v Speaker 1>leg of that stool, you won't find a solution. The

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<v Speaker 1>team who deciphered Queen Mary's code used a process called

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<v Speaker 1>hill climbing, where a computer randomly assigns the symbols and

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<v Speaker 1>the cipher two letters of the alphabet, decrypts the whole message,

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<v Speaker 1>scores it based on readability, and then repeats the process

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<v Speaker 1>only keeping the changes that increase the score of the translation.

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<v Speaker 1>After the code was cracked, the cryptologists still needed to

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<v Speaker 1>decipher the coded letters one word at a time and

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<v Speaker 1>edit transcriptions, a process that took a year. Every cipher

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<v Speaker 1>is created by some kind of algorithm or formula, and

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<v Speaker 1>Bauer says that encryption algorithms can be extremely complex, like

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<v Speaker 1>the unbreakable end to end encryption that safeguards data traveling

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<v Speaker 1>across the Internet, or extremely simple alike Julius Caesar's formula

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<v Speaker 1>in which he shifted each letter in the alphabet three

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<v Speaker 1>letters over. In cryptology terms, Caesar's method is called transposition.

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<v Speaker 1>That's any system that moves the letters of the alphabet

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<v Speaker 1>around or scrambles their order. A transposition cipher appears a

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<v Speaker 1>few times in the Hebrew Bible, in which the first

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<v Speaker 1>letter of the alphabet is swapped with the last letter,

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<v Speaker 1>the second letter with the second to last, and so on.

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<v Speaker 1>A far more difficult cipher to solve is one that

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<v Speaker 1>employs substitution, in which the letters or words in the

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<v Speaker 1>original message are replaced by other random letters, numbers, or symbols.

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<v Speaker 1>Substitution ciphers are created by using a key or a

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<v Speaker 1>cipher alphabet. A Mary, Queen of Scots, used a cipher

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<v Speaker 1>alphabet that replaced each word with a unique symbols. Such

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<v Speaker 1>a cipher could only be decoded by someone possessing the

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<v Speaker 1>same key. To make a cipher even harder to crack,

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<v Speaker 1>two different cipher keys could be employed simultaneously. These are

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<v Speaker 1>called polyalphabetic ciphers. So maybe you use one key for

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<v Speaker 1>the first word of a sentence and a different key

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<v Speaker 1>for the second word. Null symbols might be added that

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<v Speaker 1>have no meaning, just to throw off the codebreakers. Another

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<v Speaker 1>trick is to assign several different symbols to the most

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<v Speaker 1>common words, a tactic called homophonic substitution. The three guys

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<v Speaker 1>who solved the Queen Mary mystery all have day jobs.

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<v Speaker 1>George Lassary is a computer scientist living in Israel. Norbert

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<v Speaker 1>Bierman is a music professor in Germany, and Satoshi Tomokio

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<v Speaker 1>is an atrophysicist in Japan. They each had a passion

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<v Speaker 1>for historical ciphers, but it's unlikely any one of them

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<v Speaker 1>would have solved the riddle all on their own. The

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<v Speaker 1>three men found each other as part of the decrypt project,

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<v Speaker 1>and international effort to bring historians and cryptologists together and

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<v Speaker 1>give them the computational tools to decipherb ancient encrypted texts.

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<v Speaker 1>In the past, codebreakers and historians mostly worked on stubborn

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<v Speaker 1>problems in isolation, but that's changing, Bowers said. A lot

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<v Speaker 1>of the great work in cryptology is done in teams

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<v Speaker 1>of two or more people. George Laspree has established himself

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<v Speaker 1>as the best codebreaker outside of the government. He and

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<v Speaker 1>his teammates are tearing things up. Today's episode is based

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<v Speaker 1>on the article why historical cryptologists need to be part Mozart,

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<v Speaker 1>part accountant on houstofworks dot com, written by Dave Bruce.

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<v Speaker 1>Brainstuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot

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<v Speaker 1>Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For four more

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