Slashdot Mirror
NSA and the National Cryptologic Museum
Schneier writes "Most people might not be aware of it, but there's a National Cryptologic Museum at Ft. Meade, at NSA Headquarters. It's hard to know its exact relationship with the NSA. Is it part of the NSA, or is it a separate organization? Can the NSA reclassify things in its archives?" There's some interesting stuff in the comments about the building's reason for existence (window views a nearby NSA building?) and some stuff they have (an Enigma machine!).
I don't know what the rules are at the museum but the NSA had a booth at the RSA conference this year and they brought an Enigma with them. They allowed me to use it and it seemed to be in full working order. Dials rotated and the keys made the lights come on. You could even open it up and see the internal mechanism. It was an amazing experience to physically touch a piece of history like that--one of the highlights of the conference for me. A colleague of mine who is fluent in German was reading the instructions which mentioned that there was a printer that could be used with the device--something I hadn't heard before.
We owe a great debt to the code breakers at Bletchley Park like Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman and the Poles like Marian Rejewski who paved the way for them. Not only did they help win WWII and save countless lives, but they also planted the seeds for modern computer science in the process.