万花筒 Kaleidoscope 2007-06-17&19, 智慧的较量(在线收听

Deciphering the hidden meanings found in words, symbols and phrases. No, not the Da Vinci Code, but the real life crime-fighting taking place at the FBI. NBC's Pete Williams has more.

What was in a letter sent from jail by Joseph Smith, while awaiting trial for the kidnapping and murder of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia? Unable to decode the jumble of numbers and symbols, Florida police turned to the FBI's Cryptanalysis Unit---The Code Breakers. They realized those symbols stood for letters. But the FBI's Daniel Olson says they had one more puzzle to solve.

"What we thought was the first line is actually the last line, the message started at the bottom, and worked backwards all the way up to the top."

"So the message starts here, and goes right to left, up."

"Correct!"

The letter revealed where Smith hid evidence that helped convict him.

" The defendant's guilty of murder in the first degree has charged."

Not every cipher is so easy to break. Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber left behind journals protected by elaborate layers of encoding. The FBI cracked them discovering that after one of his fatal attacks, Kaczynski wrote (quote) "Excellent. Humane way to eliminate somebody." He probably never felt a thing. Sometimes Olson says they break a code in a moment of inspiration.

"You are driving in a car, and something flashes in your mind, and, and you are on the phone with someone in the office: Here, quick, try this.

Spies, gangs, the Mafia even serial killers use codes, some quite complex.

" It's one of these things that you are, you have to be tenacious like a dog, I think, when you were in these cases."

Example: Brian Regan, an intelligence analyst who stole secret documents on US spy Satellites, hoping to sell them and bury them around the country, noting the locations in a cipher.

"The code was so complex that he himself could not recall exactly how he enciphered the messages."

The key turned out to be his junior high school yearbook. Take a pair of numbers from his code, mark off that many pictures from his own photo, then count the number of letters in that student's name, to eventually find the map coordinates for the secret stashes.

Another success for FBI code breakers whose fight against crime is a battle of wits."

Pete Williams NBC News, Quantico, Virginia.
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Unabomber: University and Airline Bomber

Theodore Kaczynski: Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber, is an American infamous for his campaign of mail bombings that killed three and wounded 23. He sent bombs to several universities and airlines from the late 1970s through early 1990s. In his Industrial Society and Its Future(commonly called the "Unabomber Manifesto") he argued that his actions were a necessary (although extreme) ruse by which to attract attention to what he believed were the dangers of modern technology. The Unabomber was the target of the most expensive manhunt in the FBI's history. Kaczynski's moniker as the Unabomber developed as a result of an FBI codename. Before his real identity was known, the FBI used the handle "UNABOM" ("university and airline bomber"), which resulted in variants such as Unabomer, Unibomber, and Unabomber when the media started using the name.

  原文地址:http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/wanhuatong/2007/42033.html