Quotes About Codebreakers

The codebreakers had known for days, if not weeks, that a large Japanese attack was coming. William and the rest of his team had seen the MAGIC intercepts. It was obvious from MAGIC that Japan had been poised to strike; the only mystery was where. What surprised William on December 7 was not the attack itself but the location. He thought it would happen in Manila, not Pearl Harbor.

William concluded that Germany had never lost faith in the security of the Enigma machine. They thought Enigma was unbreakable all the way to the end. He was proud to learn that Nazi codebreakers had never managed to defeat America's best cipher machine, the SIGABA, which he had invented with Frank Rowlett.

Most of the codebreakers returned to their civilian lives, sworn to secrecy, unable to reveal their pivotal role in the Allied war effort. While those who had fought conventional battles could talk of their heroic achievements, those who had fought intellectual battles of no less significance had to endure the embarrassment of having to evade questions about their wartime activities.

Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols. The history of codes and ciphers is the story of the centuries-old battle between codemakers and codebreakers, an intellectual arms race that has had a dramatic impact on the course of history.

The Clans have forgotten the code," the voice whispered. "It has been broken time and time again, and because of the codebreakers, every Clan must pay a price. They must suffer.

They built the first computers to crack German ice, right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way.