Cyrillic Projector Code Finally Cracked

SimuAndy writes "An international group of cryptographers, the Kryptos Group, announced this week that the decade-old Cyrillic Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to some classified KGB instructions and correspondence. The Cyrillic Projector is an encrypted sculpture at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, that was created by Washington DC artist James Sanborn in the early 1990s. It was inspired by the encrypted Kryptos sculpture that Sanborn created two years earlier for CIA Headquarters. The message on the Cyrillic Projector has turned out to be in two parts. The decrypted first part is a Russian text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control potential sources of information. The second part appears to be a partial quote from classified KGB correspondence about the Soviet dissident Sakharov, with concerns that his report to the Pugwash conference was being used by the Americans for an anti-Soviet agenda."

Comments

a little offtopic but here's a related article

[CowBovNeal]

about the KGB. An eyeopener. It's a non-subscriber link.

Aliens

[NoSuchGuy]

Aliens read this and laugh out loud!

text of the article

[CowBovNeal]

COMMENTARY

The KGB's Man

By ION MIHAI PACEPA

The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career terrorist, trained, armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

* * *
"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naive enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.

Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to

MOD PARENT "OFF-TOPIC"

[mgg4]

Please!!

Why I Hate Postmodernism

[Valdrax]

The problem with modern art is that the uniqueness of artistic talent is dead. The great works of the past that we all recognize are valued because the talent required to make them was rare back in the day. Now, however, you can find a plethora people in the world with talent exceeding Van Gogh, Michaelangelo, and Da Vinci. Our liberal arts schools crank out people with this level or talent by the hundreds each year, and most of them are "doomed" to spend their lives creating office art and advertising source material.

High Art needs to be rare and unique to retain its value, and following the overabundance of talent and the disillusioned post-war post-modernism movements, we have been led to a state where Novelty is King. You can peg the art movements of the early 20th century as the real beginnings of Visceral Response and Novelty as the driving forces of the art world as it broke from the life-like imagery that had prevailed since the Renaissance. Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Abstraction slowly pulled artwork away from the technical yet evocative realism of the previous centuries and firmly into the realm of what we now refer to as "shock-value art." Artists like Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrain, and Ben Nicholson utterly rejected depictions of real-world objects and events. Later postmodern and self-impressed "ironic" works by artists like Andy Warhol coupled with the spread of high quality commercial art in advertising over the early half of the 20th century sounded the death-knell for the prevalence of actual talent in Art.

Now we have "kinetic scuptures" made up of seemingly randomly slapped-together piles of geometric figures desperately trying to pretend that the say something that wasn't said before by a hundred other "artists" in the first half of the century, icons of religious figures covered in human waste purely to piss-off people that the artist doesn't like and to give the artist a smug high-ground to pooh-pooh about censorship when the masses call troll on them, and empty fucking rooms strewn with litter and a fritzy light winning their "creator" hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes. Art is Dead because Art is in the hands of the Masses, and the little egotistic society of intellectual masturbation that makes up the patrons of the High Art world just can't have that, now can it?

Postmodernism is all about asking the question, "What is Art?" This is an important question, but postmodernism's attempts at answering it lead one to the conclusion that everything is art and thus nothing is art. Musical pieces like 4'33" by John Cage (which is nothing but him sitting at a piano not playing anything for that long) and modern unstructured rhythmless Noise like that of Merzbow essentially claim that tone, rhythm, and melody are completly unnecessary for music. All long as an emotional landscape is painted somehow, then it is music. At the same time, is makes the argument that nothing is music.

Similarly, in my mind the modern art movement is too impressed with itself. Every modern artist who generates a huge media flak always claims to be "pushing the envelope of what Art is." What a load of hooey. In the process of asking this question, they too are rhetorically hinting that anything is so long as it gets a rise. Does that mean that KKK rallies should be given grants for performance art if soaking Jesus in horse urine is art?

Modern art exists today much like the art of the past did, to provide the rich and powerful with something to show off to their peers. While the patronage system is dead, the wealthy let themselves be taken into the con and the spiel of the artist trying to hock their latest collage of rotten melon splatters and barbed wire. This sponsors the movement and gives them a chance to feel superior to their peers much like the Princes of Italian city-states in Da Vinci's time. Why buy something beautiful? The middle class can do that at any upscale mall store. You've got to get something unique.

Bah. I am ranting. I just think it's a shame that the only artists who receive large sums of money for their work now days are con artists. Talent is dead.