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cryptanalysis is another word for codebreaking—and
Codebreaking is about noticing and manipulating patterns. Humans do this without thinking. We’re wired
to see patterns. Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.
It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team.
Bacon said no, science is about physical evidence.
Knowledge is found not in the skull but in contact with Nature.
The world of American cryptology was still tiny. There were only three codebreaking units in government, with fewer than fifty employees among them.
she had “an edge on her.”
The best paper system was more secure than a weak machine, or a strong machine improperly handled, which is why inventors of cipher machines in the 1920s were struggling to make their prototypes easy to use, almost idiot-proof.
Elizebeth would one day take on the machines as well, in the most spectacular way.
invented in 1924 by a German named Alexander von Kryha,
There were just so few cryptologists of her ability, or William’s. They were like a binary star system in a void, twin suns rotating around each other, drawing lesser bodies by their light.
“Teapot Dome” affair, the biggest corruption scandal in U.S. history. His testimony caught the eye of a twenty-eight-year-old J. Edgar Hoover,
“money-grubbing Jew.” America was growing more anti-Semitic in the 1920s,
Henry Ford launched an anti-Semitic weekly newspaper with a declaration that “the Jew is the world’s enigma.”
spilled over to Elizebeth. “When they couldn’t get him, I’d be offered a job,” she said later. “That’s the story of my life. Somebody asks for my husband and they can’t get him, so they take me.”
First it was the navy that wanted to hire her, in late 1922. They had lost a civilian cryptologist, Agnes Meyer Driscoll, a woman with a mathematics Ph.D. who had left for the private sector, partnering with the horse thief Hebern to launch a cipher machine factory in California.
Barbara, the firstborn, followed by a second child, John Ramsay, three years later, in 1926.
She took a hands-off approach to parenting, hewing to a doctrine of no doctrines, in agreement with William. The Friedmans were determined not to consciously teach their kids anything or tell them what to believe, only to create a comfortable environment, pour in vitamins, “and let the rest take care of itself,” as Elizebeth put it.
these are the small decisions that erased Elizebeth from the record and later allowed J. Edgar Hoover to take credit for her achievements.
