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Maybe, but remember that there is a huge practical problem with all of these systems. You have to get your Enigma machines and processes and papers and trained officers and technicians and informed generals and couriers and radio listeners and everything else all set up, and then if you find out that there is a security failure, there's a massive institutional inertia not wanting to change anything that you're going to have to overcome.

So the British listened to the Germans, the Germans listened to the Russians, the Russians listened to the Americans, the Americans listened to the Japanese, and the Japanese listened to the Native Americans. I think the super-duper-ness of the Enigma system is mostly propaganda. For a couple of years early in the war it was a pretty stupendous effort, and then the weirdo English mathematicians and chess players were replaced by massive brute force computers over in the U.S.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brewbooks/3318667711/in/photostream/

by asdf on Tue Aug 20th, 2013 at 11:56:14 AM EST
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Partly that, partly I remember reading the British and Americans sold on these German uncrackable encryption machines to friends and allies after the war, so they would keep the advantage. And even after the Russians found out about it from the Cambridge spies after the war, they weren't going to grass them up, because then they could read those allied transmissions too.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Tue Aug 20th, 2013 at 04:24:53 PM EST
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