It was crazy going to work for people who work in finance and for the city. It took about half an hour to get into their offices.

The AMEX Headquarters has been under such security since it moved back to the World Financial Center in May 2002. I guess since Midtown has been targeted a little more specifically, they're just doing what Lower Manhattan has been used to for some time. :(

I'm leaving town during the convention, anyway.

Coventry. The Enigma cypher machine decrypts (under the code name ULTRA) were so sensitive that they were one of the last secrets of World War II that have been declassified. Even then, there's still some information that remains classified because it would divulge 'intelligence sources and methods" (i.e. expose a well-placed 'mole' inside an adversarial foreign government).

A similar decryption program for Japanese message traffic was under the code name MAGIC.

All the indications that pointed to a probable attack on the United States by Japan were in plain sight, but the intelligence information was dismissed out of hand or acted upon too late to be of any use.

Enigma was a breakthrough in cryptological machines when it was introduced in the 1930s, though there are infinitely more powerful (and highly classified) cypher machines in use today. Most of the US crypto machines had to be redesigned after the traitor John Walker sold 'em out to the Russkies.

Awww... Alan Turing *tears*.

Really though, he had a very interesting life and his Enigma machines were basically insturmental in the Allies winning WWII. AND... and a woman in computer science - the Enigma project was a great example of women's interacting with computers!

To be honest, the word around here is that no one has yet found a efficient method of breaking the current ecryption standards. There are brute force ways, but they are still slow and costly. The discovery of an efficient method of decomposing large numbers into their primes would of course, change that, which some people speculate would ruin the world economy. Fun stuff eh?

Interesting revealation today that most (?) of the information for Sunday's announcement is up to four years old.

I'd like to know how much, if any, of this is really new.