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Code Cracked: Mysterious NSA Tweet Is Decrypted in Seconds

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NSA's recruiting office sent out a mystifying tweet Monday morning, prompting observers to question whether perhaps the agency had sent the nonsense message by accident. But on closer inspection, the tweet turned out to be a code designed to lure in would-be cryptographers though by cipher standards, it's a pretty simple one.

The letters below look at first like they could represent anything. But to the eye of a cryptographer, a few things stand out. See if you can spot them.

The period comes at the end, and each "word" is 12 characters long except those with punctuation. This suggests that the spaces are meaningless, only the letters are in code, and the symbols are being used normally.

In addition, simple analysis of the coded text shows that some letters appear more frequently than others, just as in English and other languages. This suggests the code is a simple "substitution cypher," where each letter is changed for another.

This type of cryptogram is among the oldest and simplest, one version of it having been used by none other than Julius Caesar.

Such simple code can be solved by brute force, using a computer tool to try hundreds of different combinations of letter swaps. It only took six seconds for this Web app to figure out the solution, albeit with a minor error. But half an hour's work would have done it, too: The most common letters in the code (P, C and I) are likely the most common letters in English (E, T and A) as indeed they turned out to be. The message is:

"Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Monday in may as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

Not quite as disappointing as "Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine," but still not as exciting as people might have hoped. We'll keep an eye on the NSA's Twitter account to see if future coded messages appear this month.

When contacted for more information, an NSA spokesperson wrote in an email to NBC News that the coded tweet is not in fact the first, and is "part of recruitment efforts to attract the best and the brightest."

First published May 5 2014, 1:10 PM

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Code Cracked: Mysterious NSA Tweet Is Decrypted in Seconds

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NSA's Encrypted Tweet: We're Hiring Code Breakers

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hide captionA sign stands outside the National Security Administration (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md., in 2013. The agency on Monday tweeted an encoded job ad.

A sign stands outside the National Security Administration (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md., in 2013. The agency on Monday tweeted an encoded job ad.

What better way to recruit potential code-breakers than to advertise in cipher? That's what the NSA did Monday morning with this mysterious tweet:

According to The Washington Post, if you're good at breaking substitution ciphers, this is what you'd come up with:

want to know what it takes to work at nsa? check back each monday as we explore careers essential to protecting your nation.

At first, some people who saw the tweet thought the NSA might just be drunk or perhaps someone had inadvertently sent a butt tweet. But, it turns out that the coded tweet was the first of several in a month-long campaign to "explore careers essential to protecting our nation," NSA spokeswoman Marci Green Miller told The Daily Dot.

"NSA is known as the code makers and code breakers," Miller told the website in an email. "As part of our recruitment efforts to attract the best and the brightest, we will post mission related coded Tweets on Mondays in the month of May."

The Daily Dot says:

"While posting coded messages on Twitter is a new recruitment strategy for the agency, NSA officials have been known to attend hacker conferences in attempt to cajole new talent."

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NSA's Encrypted Tweet: We're Hiring Code Breakers

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REVEALED: Here's The Solution To That Encoded NSA Puzzle Tweet

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This morning, the NSA Careers Twitter account posted what looked like a series of nonsense letters:

We looked at this tweetand thought it looked suspciously like a coded message.

It turns out that it was. A couple of our commenters on our earlier post came up with the deciphered message: "Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Monday in May as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

While some of us were hoping that it would be instructions to secret agents, it's simply a notification of future tweets.

The message was encoded with a simple substitution cipher, one of the most basic ways to encrypt something. In a cipher of this type, the alphabet is scrambled, with each letter in the alphabet assigned to another letter.

For example, T in the encrypted message corresponds to W in the uncoded text, P corresponds to A, F corresponds to N, and C corresponds to T. That makes the first four letters of the encrypted message, "TPFC," turn into the first word of the decrypted message, "Want." Notice that spaces and punctuation don't matter in this code.

This is a very very basic type of encryption, and can be broken fairly easily. The big problem with substitution ciphers is that English letters have a distinct frequency distribution, as explained at Practical Cryptography:

So, to crack the code, the first step is to count up the letter frequencies in the encoded text, and put them into alignment with English-letter frequencies. The most common letters in the coded message will probably be the letters assigned to common letters in normal English, like e, t, or a. Letters that are missing or rare in the coded text will probably be assigned to rare English letters like q, x, and z.

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REVEALED: Here's The Solution To That Encoded NSA Puzzle Tweet

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Michael Hayden's Unwitting Case Against Secret Surveillance

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The former head of the NSA asserted that one can't know whether spying is legitimate or not unless one knows all the details about it.

Reuters

Is state surveillance a legitimate defense of our freedoms? The question was put to Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, during a debate Friday evening in Toronto. Alan Dershowitz joined him to argue the affirmative. Glenn Greenwald and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian argued against the resolution.

No One Opposes All Surveillance: False Equivalence on the NSA

Going in, I expected to disagree with Hayden, who presided over the NSA's illegal program of warrantless wiretapping in the years after the September 11 attacks. But I want to emphatically agree with the very first remarks he made in the debate.

"State surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms," he said, restating the resolution. "Well, we all know the answer to that. It depends. And it depends on facts."

He quickly clarified:

It depends on the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves. What kind of surveillance? For what kind of purposes? In what kind of state of danger?

And that's why facts matter.

In having this debate, in trying to decide whether this surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms, we really need to know exactly what this surveillance is.

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Michael Hayden's Unwitting Case Against Secret Surveillance

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The Latest Attacks On NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden – Kevin Gosztola Discusses – Video

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The Latest Attacks On NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden - Kevin Gosztola Discusses
Kevin Gosztola discusses the latest attacks on whistle blower Edward Snowden. Read more about it here: http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/04/17/nothing-wi...

By: Matthew Filipowicz

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The Latest Attacks On NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden - Kevin Gosztola Discusses - Video

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