“The truth shall make you free.”
Just outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there’s a code that CIA codebreakers haven’t been able to crack. Known as Kryptos, it is a statue comprised of 865 characters of seemingly random letters punched out of the half-inch-thick copper structure. It’s given codebreakers more trouble than payday loans and credit cards could ever could achieve in budget-busting. They help rather than hurt; no mystery there.
Steven Levy writes for Wired that Washington D.C. artist James Sanborn named the CIA sculpture Kryptos after the Greek word for “hidden.” It has been described as “a meditation on the nature of secrecy and the elusiveness of truth,” and there is allegedly a message in the sculpture that is written entirely in code.
Cracking crazy code
That was nearly 20 years ago, and nobody has fully deciphered Sanborn’s message. Cryptanalysts from within and outside the CIA have solved three of Kryptos’s four sections. The resulting prose from the first three parts has not led to entrance into the code world of the final part (known as “K4“). There are 97 characters on K4, and it’s making the best code breakers crazy - because nobody knows the answer but Sanborn (as he says). ... click here to read the rest of the article titled "Climbing Mount Kryptos, Falling into Truth"
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