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Investigators Crack DB Cooper Code, Identify Suspect With Possible CIA Connections (seattlepi.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
A private investigative team announced Thursday morning that members now believe D.B. Cooper was a black ops CIA operative possibly even involved with Iran-Contra, and that his identity has been actively hidden by government agents. The 40-member cold-case team comprised of several former FBI agents and led by Thomas and Dawna Colbert made its latest reveal after a code breaker working with the team found connections in each of five letters allegedly sent by Cooper in the days following the famed hijacking in 1971.
What's more, several people who knew Colbert's top suspect, a man named Robert W. Rackstraw, have noted possible connections to the CIA and to top-secret operations, Colbert said. "The new decryptions include a dare to agents, directives to apparent partners, and a startling claim that is followed by Rackstraw's own initials: If captured, he expects a get-out-of-jail card from a federal spy agency," Colbert said in a news release... In a brief phone call last year, Rackstraw only told SeattlePI to verify Colbert's claims; he didn't issue a denial, or comment further on Colbert's investigation...
Late last year, Colbert's team obtained a fifth letter allegedly sent by Cooper that Colbert said supports a possible FBI cover-up, but also included random letters and numbers. A code breaker on Colbert's team was able to decode the letters and numbers and find they pointed to three Army units Rackstraw was connected to during his military service in Vietnam. The code was meant to serve as a signal to his co-conspirators that he was alive and well after the jump, Colbert said... Another letter, in which Cooper claimed to be CIA openly, also had the letters "RWR" at the end -- the initials of Robert W. Rackstraw, according to Colbert.
What's more, several people who knew Colbert's top suspect, a man named Robert W. Rackstraw, have noted possible connections to the CIA and to top-secret operations, Colbert said. "The new decryptions include a dare to agents, directives to apparent partners, and a startling claim that is followed by Rackstraw's own initials: If captured, he expects a get-out-of-jail card from a federal spy agency," Colbert said in a news release... In a brief phone call last year, Rackstraw only told SeattlePI to verify Colbert's claims; he didn't issue a denial, or comment further on Colbert's investigation...
Late last year, Colbert's team obtained a fifth letter allegedly sent by Cooper that Colbert said supports a possible FBI cover-up, but also included random letters and numbers. A code breaker on Colbert's team was able to decode the letters and numbers and find they pointed to three Army units Rackstraw was connected to during his military service in Vietnam. The code was meant to serve as a signal to his co-conspirators that he was alive and well after the jump, Colbert said... Another letter, in which Cooper claimed to be CIA openly, also had the letters "RWR" at the end -- the initials of Robert W. Rackstraw, according to Colbert.
A short ciphertext can decrypt to anything your'e motivated to make it say. All of this is very thin.
I've heard some far out conspiracy theories, but this one takes the cake! It's even more far out than the crazy people who came out of the woodwork after the JFK assassination.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
ba dum pa
Exactly how did this dead man send five encoded letters.
Pretty much everyone's dead, so it's the thrill of the hunt that's driving people.
That's an awful noisy op for a couple hundred grand. Unless part of the CIA's mission statement is to make sure life plays out like a soap opera, anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/07/13/0357225/fbi-closes-db-cooper-investigation-after-45-years?sdsrc=rel
FBI is again guilty of framing conservative for illegal acts of the liberal democrat party and clinton-obama coup plotters. Destroy the FBI for great justice.
You obviously are not a big picture type of person. You're just comparing $. You are ignoring the intangibles, particularly that if they can solve the case and arrest someone, they discourage someone from trying this type of thing again. And the next guy could decide he didn't want to leave any witnesses.
That's what it sounds like, all these stupid fake stories and all your commentaries.
Man, I'm telling you, this is BIGGER than Al Capone's safe. When Slashdot scoops the New York Times, you just know it's going to be a great weekend.
So it's been 40 years. He hasn't been caught. How many times has this been tried since then? There have been hijackings since then, which has led to increased security. I don't think finding DB Cooper is going to dissuade anyone from going after a plane if they are crazy or dumb enough to try.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The coded letters, reportedly sent by D.B. Cooper, actually reveal that D.B. Cooper wrote the Voynich manuscript while deployed to the grassy knoll so he could fake the moon landing videos.
The guy "outed" isn't the one. It's been disproved. He's 15 years younger than "DB Cooper" for one thing. If the person didn't die jumping from the plane, he would be over 85 years old today. Most likely he died in the attempt, or has long since died. These "hounds" pop up about every year of the anniversary, to hawk their books and what not.
Because there is a vast government conspiracy it must be true.
Hey! Conspiracy theorists pay taxes too, you know!
I know reading TFA is hard, but at least read the summary. These were private investigators doing this in their own time. The team includes a whole bunch of former FBI and other former government people, but none of your tax money is going to this.
Robert Rackstraw stories always amaze me, mostly because we forget so much about what life was like during the Vietnam Era. There's a lot of context missing from this analysis, like how so many people went around claiming to be D.B. Cooper during the 70s and how a good number of them had similar military training. This is back when Soldier of Fortune was a guide to being manly and a life of adventure that didn't involve a snowboard was still to be had.
You could apply the same logic the author does to the cases of Ted Mayfield, Richard McCoy, and a few others to reach the same conclusions. Robert Rackstraw is undoubtedly a badass and someone I'd love to have a beer with, just the stories about his Silver Stars are pretty incredible.
But, when you consider all the other things he's done, for Rackstraw to be DB Cooper is outside-the-realm-of-possibility amazing. Apply some common sense: how could he have done this without some help from the FBI? Why would the FBI protect someone who also stole an airplane trying to fake his own death?
I think the author watched too much A-Team as a kid and has a fascination with Murdock.
A quick look at the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper) reveals that in 2007, FBI secured DNA traces from the hijacker's tie.
If this DNA matches the suspect, this would be hard to explain.
This is not the first time Rackstraw is under investigation. He appeared already in 1978 in the investigation, but this is far from the only suspect that has been identified. The Wikipedia article lists ten other individuals that - on the surface of things - appear just as likely as him.
I'd say that this is another hypothesis generated by the famousness of the case, like other famous crime cases in the past. The "Jack the ripper" suspect list on Wikipedia counts no less than 29 persons.
if you work for the feds, you aren't a "suspect", you're an "operative".
https://xkcd.com/1400/
This was the plot of an episode of the short-lived TV show "Journeyman". Just sayin'
Late last year, Colbert's team obtained a fifth letter allegedly sent by Cooper that Colbert said supports a possible FBI cover-up, but also included random letters and numbers. A code breaker on Colbert's team was able to decode the letters and numbers and find they pointed to three Army units Rackstraw was connected to
emphasis mine.
Gee, I wonder why somebody suddenly wants to call attention to this outlandish story that alleges the FBI is riddled with corrupt yet devilishly competent conspirators who have been able to conceal the real identity of the most famous hijacker in history for over four decades?
ROFL, sounds like another crackpot book in the making and a decent check for a marketing firm.
Home of The Suki Series
Yeah, clearly needed more coffee.
This sounds like an Archer episode.
You're letting facts get in the way of a good rant. Sometimes facts don't do what you want them to.
Given the semiregularity of these announcements, they will now switch to Ubuntu-style scheduling.
Twice a year, on April 1 and October 1, releases of the latest proof and confirmed cooper will be made. No attempt will be made to keep these going longer than six months.
Every two and a have years, though, a LTN (Long Term Nonsense) will be released, with the wild guesses, speculation, and made up stuff promised to be supported for a full three years, or until you can't read it anyway from your eyes rolling too far from forward, whichever comes first.
hawk
The same group has announced they've also found the REAL Hope Diamond (the one on display is a fake), Obama's Birth Certificate, and recordings of Trump's meetings with Putin.
Because they've cracked the code.
You are telling me Jimmy James was in the CIA?
You left out the part where, after faking the videos, he was taken up by aliens, to be re-united with Elvis.
I clicked the link in TFS but after the page loaded it had a lot of blank space and just didn't look right. So I glanced at the URL, saw "www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/amp/..." and realized I'd been had.
C'mon Slashdot, why can't you filter links to catch AMP URLs, then find and offer us a direct, un-"enhanced" link to the article?
Here it is:
http://www.seattlepi.com/seatt...
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
Who did you think was finally able to decipher the code?
Nah, just a brain.
Trump 2020!
Jesus H Christ, the grasp of English here is not getting better.
>The 40-member cold-case team comprised of several former FBI agents
No. Several former FBI agents comprised the team. The team was *composed* of several former FBI agents.
Comprise, compose. It's not difficult. They teach it in school, to schoolchildren.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Tom Lehrer? Who worked for the NSA in the mid-50s. But I'm sure you're right--he had help from his contemporary, Elvis.
Should we really be basing our opinions on something we learned from the Colbert Report ?
Nullius in verba
There is about a one in a million chance that Rackstraw (or any random person) was a black ops CIA operative. There is a one in 200 million chance of someone being DB Cooper. The odds that a person is BOTH DB Cooper and a black ops CIA operative is 1 in 200 trillion.
I thought Jack the Ripper had been positively identified as the Loch Ness Monster.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
This guy is a writer and he thinks a cache of money is pronounced cash-ay?
Although not an avid DBCooper ID'd fan, that was also the name I came up with several years back, which leads me to believe they are correct.
The best code at that time and the easiest to do with a piece of paper, were one time pad. You agreed in advance with your accomplice of a series of book and chapter, then you encode each letter once using the book letter as one time pad, heck even a roman cipher is good enough using the OTP as key. You omit space and punctuation so that word can't be recognized, and statistic will be useless due to the OTP nature. If necessary add a simple shift for each letter e.g. fibbo modulo 26. Then switch to next book/chapter. Good luck finding out even with a good computer due to the nature of OTP and that pretty much any text could be validly output, but you don't need a powerful computer to encode, just a pieces of paper and the aforementioned books, same for decoding. The reason such method are not nowadays used widely , is because exchanging keys is easier for commercial exchange of message. But the spy stuff nowadays? You can be your ass it is still some form of OTP. Sometimes the oldest method are simply uncrackable.
I heared it was the queen Elizabeth who was ruling during that time and absolutely detested prostitution. I like that theory a lot! For it to be more plausible you could say it was someone hired by the queen but I prefer to imagine it was her majesty in disguise concealing her voice as manly and wearing all black with a cape, it would almost be a better version of batman.
JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, DB Cooper, Oswald, [insert your character here] conspiracy theories of what really happened are same old rehash and retreads. I guess nobody is creative these days to come up with new genres.
Bernie Rhodes author of "The Real McCoy" about the 1972 hijacker that managed to do a DB Cooper from a 727 but was later caught. Rhodes, a DOJ probation officer, said many guys already arrested for other crimes come to him claiming to be DB Cooper. Rhodes would ask questions like what kind of tie did they wear, what did they exactly say to the flight attendant, etc. I asked Rhodes why would they confess to something serious like skyjacking. "Some of these guys were facing much more serious charges besides skyjacking."
And to think DB Cooper, whether died jumping, actually got away with one fifth of ONE MILLION DOLLARS (which aint diddly these days).
mfwright@batnet.com
I would be more inclined to look into the motivations and funding of the investigators. This looks from the outside like another case of waiting until the players/witnesses who can easily call bullshit on the assertions to die off, and then making some clickbait-worthy claims in order to get access to some otherwise restricted datasets. The goal might not be the DB Cooper case at all, but casting doubt on something else or exposing some operation they were tangentially associated with.
>>The odds that a person is BOTH DB Cooper and a black ops CIA operative is 1 in 200 trillion.
> So he never existed (1 in 200 trillion odds in a population of under 5 billion means a 99.999% chance of a non-event)?
We're not talking about the odds that Robert exists. We're talking about the odds that both he is DB Cooper (roughly one in 200 million) AND ALSO he's a black ops CIA agent (roughly one in a million).
> That number also includes being a black ops CIA operative because all of the black ops CIA operatives are part of that 230m population size.
The odds that you are male are about 50/50. Because about half of all people are male. The odds that you are both male AND are over seven feet tall are much less than 50/50, though both are "part of that 230 million population size". The only thing that "both are part of the population" tells us is that it's POSSIBLE to be both. To find the odds of being both, you multiply the odds of A times the odds of B, unless being A makes you more likely to be B.
You said "that number also includes being a black ops". That number would also include being black ops IF we knew that all people who are DB Cooper are also black ops. On other words, if we already knew that DB Cooper was black ops, the odds of a random person being DB Cooper would be tough to 1in 200 million and that would include what we already knew - that Cooper was black ops.
In fact we know that very, very few people are CIA black ops. It's very unlikely that I'm black ops, very unlikely that you're CIA black ops, and very unlikely that DB Cooper was black ops. Even IF Cooper was black ops, Cooper probably wouldn't be Robert.
> It may actually be true that all DB Coopers are black ops CIA,
It may be true that you are CIA black ops. Unlikely though. Unlikely as in million to one odds against.
It may be true that I'm CIA black ops. Unlikely though. Million to one shot.
It may be true that Robert is black ops. Unlikely though. Million to one unlikely.
It may be true that Robert is DB Cooper. Millions to one odds against it, though.
The odds that he's BOTH black CIA AND ALSO DB Cooper - trillion to one against.
Nunes just wrote a memo about it.
To be fair, there was a great deal of tax money spent on the investigation. The case was actively investigated for 45 years. It was suspended in 2016 but remains open.: https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us...
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