This was a very generous response to some questions sent to our friends at the American Cryptogram Association. Hopefully this will continue to help those of us who weren’t able to be there.
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Hello Kryptosfan,
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We did, in fact, have Ed Scheidt as our banquet speaker. To the best of my knowledge, there is no recording of his talk. One of our members from across the pond had asked ahead of time if we could record it and place the recording on the web. I was not particularly in favor of the idea, but I did run it by Ed and he did not want his presentation recorded. So I have not made a recording. I have no idea if any of our members secretly made one. I would doubt it, but you never know.
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The first part of his talk was on medieval cryptography. It was actually very interesting. I think they could make a half hour to an hour PBS show on it, and I’d like to watch it several times over. I only had four hours of sleep the night before Ed’s talk, so I might have missed a few points. From what I remember, the guilds would use cryptography to protect their trade secrets and processes for alchemy or distilling or whatever. They would use code circles/rings, but the rings would be fixed in place. There were keywords involved, and if you were a member of the guild and knew the keywords, you could read the books, otherwise not.
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The second part of his talk was on Kryptos. A lot of the background information he presented you already know. He also had a few pages of a recently declassified NSA document that Elonka had obtain via an FOIA request.
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During the question and answer phase there were two items I thought were interesting:
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(1) After part IV is decrypted, the next thing to figure out is how the receiver’s identity is kept hidden. Ed said that this was built into the process, but gave no clues as to how it is done.
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(2) The ID BY ROWS / LAYERTWO error may not have been a mistake after all. Sometimes in spycraft you deliberately do these things.
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Hope this helps,
Regards,
ENDEAVOUR
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Thank you again so very much ENDEAVOUR!
Tagged: ACA, American Cryptogram Association, IDBYROWS, k4, kryptos, layer two, sanborn, Schedit
