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Normally, when you encrypt a message, you have a recipient in mind. When it's one government to another government, or one person to another person, it's safe t

Normally, when you encrypt a message, you have a recipient in mind. When it's one government to another government, or one person to another person, it's safe to assume that the message is authentic and meaningful, and not just designed to waste time, and that a recipient has a way of decoding the message. Normally, the point of encrypting a message is that you want it to be unbreakable by anyone except the intended recipient, and that you're not wasting their time by sending gibberish once decoded. In this case, it's a deranged serial killer that's sending a message to law enforcement. The sender is someone who kills people for personal gratification, so it's pretty safe to assume that someone who does that might also want to mess with people for the sake of personal gratification. Crucially, there is no intended recipient other than law enforcement, so there would be no reason to include any actual sensitive information because there's no one to send it to other than the FBI. There's no reason to believe that he'd write a message that would give himself up. Real life is not like the fable of Rumpelstiltskin where solving a riddle makes someone honor-bound to give themselves up. Continuing to solve these ciphers probably fed into power trips and sexual gratification for the author. It is not surprising that an investigative agency did not allocate a ton of resources to decode a message that one could anticipate would say something like "are you having fun with my game yet?" without any other prior information.

Apocryphon 6y ago
Certainly, the FBI in the '60s and '70s would have been unlikely to be expanding much effort towards this situation. Though I think everyone here is assuming that intelligence agencies treat all of these public puzzles with the same degree of utmost seriousness. Take the Taman Shud mystery- only one death, completely without context. Yet it's mentioned that military analysts took a shot at unravelling the mystery: > In 1978, following a request from ABC-TV journalist Stuart Littlemore, Department of Defence cryptographers analysed the handwritten text. The cryptographers reported that it would be impossible to provide "a satisfactory answer": if the text were an encrypted message, its brevity meant that it had "insufficient symbols" from which a clear meaning could be extracted, and the text could be the "meaningless" product of a "disturbed mind". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case I don't think spies are any less interested in perplexing mysteries than the rest of the public. While I don't expect that an agency would throw all of their manpower at a case such as this, I could imagine individual analysts taking a stab at it on their own time. Maybe the organizations themselves might sponsor side projects as a means to test codebreaking techniques and glean lessons along in the process. I mean, why else does the NSA have a page on the Voynich Manuscript: https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/voynich/ https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/voy... They even did an entire study on it: https://archive.org/details/VoynichManuscriptAnElegantEnigma/page/n1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/VoynichManuscriptAnElegantEnigma... Serious agencies dive into less-than-serious studies into exotic or sensationalist topics all of the time. Sometimes for general interest, sometimes for good PR, sometimes simply because of bureaucratic waste. Why else do we hear about military studies of UFOs, from Project Blue Book to recent news stories? Given the enduring mystery of the Zodiac Killer, I can't imagine why some of these professionals- beyond the FBI even- might not have tried to crack it, themselves. And perhaps some have already succeeded. Edit: > There's no reason to believe that he'd write a message that would give himself up. Real life is not like the fable of Rumpelstiltskin where solving a riddle makes someone honor-bound to give themselves up. Despite this, perhaps figuring out the message would've given some sort of psychological insight or contextual clues that could have helped investigators determine the identity of the killer. Not to mention, your point is refuted retroactively by the case of the BTK Killer, whose taunting anonymous puzzles were his downfall. Though admittedly investigators identified him not by actually solving his puzzles, but by analyzing the medium they were conveyed in.
sennight 6y ago
Well a highschool teacher deciphered one of the letters soon after it was published... so the time wasting excuse doesn't work. As far as resources are concerned: "July 12, 2016 Update: The FBI has redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities." -- https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijacking https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijacking Here is a much more simple explanation: the FBI is notoriously bad at anything involving encryption or novel dynamics. That is why the Secret Service was so heavily involved in the big hacker crackdown decades ago, because the FBI was totally lost in the sauce. Bank robbery, payrolling informants, and CP they've got down pat.
- t0r0nat0r 6y ago
  Internet, noun: A place where everyone is an expert on everything. Synonyms: Conjectural circlejerk.

Apocryphon 6y ago

Certainly, the FBI in the '60s and '70s would have been unlikely to be expanding much effort towards this situation. Though I think everyone here is assuming that intelligence agencies treat all of these public puzzles with the same degree of utmost seriousness. Take the Taman Shud mystery- only one death, completely without context. Yet it's mentioned that military analysts took a shot at unravelling the mystery: > In 1978, following a request from ABC-TV journalist Stuart Littlemore, Department of Defence cryptographers analysed the handwritten text. The cryptographers reported that it would be impossible to provide "a satisfactory answer": if the text were an encrypted message, its brevity meant that it had "insufficient symbols" from which a clear meaning could be extracted, and the text could be the "meaningless" product of a "disturbed mind". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case I don't think spies are any less interested in perplexing mysteries than the rest of the public. While I don't expect that an agency would throw all of their manpower at a case such as this, I could imagine individual analysts taking a stab at it on their own time. Maybe the organizations themselves might sponsor side projects as a means to test codebreaking techniques and glean lessons along in the process. I mean, why else does the NSA have a page on the Voynich Manuscript: https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/voynich/ https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/voy... They even did an entire study on it: https://archive.org/details/VoynichManuscriptAnElegantEnigma/page/n1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/VoynichManuscriptAnElegantEnigma... Serious agencies dive into less-than-serious studies into exotic or sensationalist topics all of the time. Sometimes for general interest, sometimes for good PR, sometimes simply because of bureaucratic waste. Why else do we hear about military studies of UFOs, from Project Blue Book to recent news stories? Given the enduring mystery of the Zodiac Killer, I can't imagine why some of these professionals- beyond the FBI even- might not have tried to crack it, themselves. And perhaps some have already succeeded. Edit: > There's no reason to believe that he'd write a message that would give himself up. Real life is not like the fable of Rumpelstiltskin where solving a riddle makes someone honor-bound to give themselves up. Despite this, perhaps figuring out the message would've given some sort of psychological insight or contextual clues that could have helped investigators determine the identity of the killer. Not to mention, your point is refuted retroactively by the case of the BTK Killer, whose taunting anonymous puzzles were his downfall. Though admittedly investigators identified him not by actually solving his puzzles, but by analyzing the medium they were conveyed in.

sennight 6y ago

Well a highschool teacher deciphered one of the letters soon after it was published... so the time wasting excuse doesn't work. As far as resources are concerned: "July 12, 2016 Update: The FBI has redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities." -- https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijacking https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijacking Here is a much more simple explanation: the FBI is notoriously bad at anything involving encryption or novel dynamics. That is why the Secret Service was so heavily involved in the big hacker crackdown decades ago, because the FBI was totally lost in the sauce. Bank robbery, payrolling informants, and CP they've got down pat.

t0r0nat0r 6y ago
Internet, noun: A place where everyone is an expert on everything. Synonyms: Conjectural circlejerk.