Apple is getting strong-armed into doing something it promised their customers they won’t do; compromise the security function of their cell phone. We all know the daily headlines about the San Bernadino case, the feds, Apple, and the “why fors” and “why nots”.
Above is a picture of a place that costs a lot of money. It’s the NSA (National Security Agency). What good they do… I dunno. It’s been around since 1952. They didn’t straighten out the Gulf of Tonkin crap when they should have. They have no idea who was behind the shooting of JFK or Oswald… Maybe those events don’t fall under “National Security.” They had no clue 20 some odd people were in the country about to fly airplanes into buildings on 9-11. Just WHAT THE HELL IS THEIR JOB?
And now, the country comes to its knees because of a cellphone. “How CAN we get into it?”
During WW-2, the German High Command began using the Lorenz machine to communicate in a level of security that made the Enigma machine look archaic. I won’t go into how it worked, but it included a code system randomly inserting false letters and banks of revolving cogs that changed with every character input. It was brilliant… if used properly.
A couple of Lorenz operators made the fatal flaw of typing a message twice on the machine without changing any of the initial settings.
That’s a major no-no in any encoding system broadcast into the free air where smart people can listen.
At Bletchley Park, a couple few brainiacs put their minds to solving the problem.
Well, first of all, a common ham radio listener that had captured the transmission and noted the similarities to the first and second messages alerted “higher ups”, hey… I got som’pin here! A regular guy… but with enough brains to know what to do, and act upon it.
The team, headed by John Tiltman and Bill Tutte, without even knowing what a Lorenz machine was, or looked like, figured out how the thing had to be constructed, how many cogs, how many banks of cogs, and what exact coding system it produced. Their hand drawings… again without seeing a Lorenz were accurate design schematics for the actual article. (Their work has been described as the largest intellectual achievement of WW-2; not the Manhattan Project… not Turing expanding upon the Polish Enigma cracking… but what they produced out of thin air.
Granted, Churchill gave Bletchley Park all the money they needed like the NSA gets from our government. The one big difference; Bletchley Park produced results.
Just what the hell does the NSA do, anyhow?
(To be sure, I do not want the NSA cracking our cellphones. But… what good do they do per metric ton of $100 bills off loaded to their shipping docks daily?)