I spent days scouring the web trying to find some sort of comprehensive list of James Sanborn's artwork, but no dice (Sanborn, btw, is the sculptor that made "Kryptos"). I even contacted his agents and asked for a list, but they said that there wasn't such a thing, and that if they were to ask the artist for a complete list of his sculptures, he'd probably laugh at them since there were so many.

So, I went ahead and made my own list. I guess this makes me the self-appointed head of the Jim Sanborn fanclub. ;)

Artist/Sculptor James Sanborn

Congratulations to Elonka on making prime coverage in the New York Times ...

For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect.

Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages ...

A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery

Depuis que l'auteur de best-sellers Dan Brown s'intéresse à elle, des centaines d'amateurs tentent de décrypter son message codé. Mais cela fait déjà quinze ans que Kryptos, sculpture érigée au QG de la CIA à Washington, résiste.

New article about Kryptos that just appeared in a French tabloid.

Liberation.fr - Da VinCIA code (& Kryptos)

] Episode 78 - Cryptography (original air date: 01/11/2005)

Stankdawg's web radio program -- I was co-host for this week's episode. Check the link to download the MP3. We talked about some "Cryptography 101" stuff, including a brief overview of the PhreakNIC v3.0 Code and Kryptos. We ran out of time discussing the Cyrillic Projector, but may cover it in a future show.

Thanks to SD for inviting me!

Elonka :)

Binary Revolution - The Cryptography Episode

Elonka wrote:

Get out your pencils: the most mysterious of all codes in the most clandestine of all places has yet to be fully broken. "Kryptos," a coded sculpture in the courtyard of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, contains a long string of seemingly nonsensical letters that conceal a message devised by sculptor James Sanborn. Correspondent and supersleuth Chad Cohen gets cracking, covering the cipher techniques used by Sanborn and the success of amateur code breaker Jim Gillogly at reading portions of the text. The deciphered sections include a poem, a reference to something buried on CIA grounds, and an extract from an eyewitness report of the discovery of King Tut's tomb. But the beguiling last bit of the message remains a mystery. Solutions anyone?

Okay, we're within "TiVo" time-range, so I figured it was about time I blogged it. Next week, Tuesday night on NOVA, there will be a 15-minute segment on Kryptos. The documentary filmmakers did their homework on this one: There are interviews with Kryptos artist Sanborn, code expert Ed Scheidt (who designed the systems that are used on Kryptos), Jim Gillogly (first person to publicly crack parts 1-3), and yours truly, Kryptos fangirl incarnate. ;) They flew me out to DC, to film an interview at the Hirshhorn museum next to Sanborn's "Antipodes" sculpture (which has all the text of Kryptos, plus encrypted Russian text which we cracked in 2003). I'm looking forward to seeing the segment!

FYI,

Elonka :)

I'm watching it now, Elonka! As you can imagine I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw you on the preview. I'll update this post after I watch then entire episode.

Post viewing edit: I thought they did a great job of introducing crypto, and Kryptos, to the layman. A couple of my friends who also watched the segment agreed, and noted that they have a renewed interest in crypto. Congratulations, Elonka.

Also, try to crack this code they presented at the end of the segment:

WNLWfeyyjpbPHG

RE: Kryptos on NOVAscienceNOW - July 24, 2007

For more than a decade, amateur and professional cryptographers have been trying to decipher an encrypted sculpture that sits on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Three-fourths of the sculpture has already been solved.

But now Jim Sanborn, the artist who created the Kryptos sculpture, says he made a mistake and a previously solved part of the puzzle that sleuths assumed for years was correct isn't.

Big big news: Everybody who thought they knew the answer to K2, check again. Instead of ending "...seconds west. ID by rows", the correct plaintext is "...seconds west. X Layer Two".

More details at our Kryptos Group announcement.

Heading back to watch the webcounter spin,

Elonka :)

Wired News: Kryptos Part 2 Was Wrong

Morning Edition, June 9, 2005 · For 15 years, a bronze sculpture in the CIA's courtyard has taunted amateur and professional code-breakers alike. Kryptos is a copper wall that features four long coded passages. Cryptographers from the National Security Administration and the CIA have cracked the first three.

I was *extremely* annoyed to only find out about this segment *after* it aired. But at least there's a stream on the website.

I'm also very disappointed in NPR, since it looks like they pulled most of the factoids for their piece straight out of the Wall Street Journal article. I got no contacts from them, whatsoever, which is a big flag to me that the reporter was *not* doing their homework. I'd had higher hopes for NPR's journalism. Then again, they did get quotes from Sanborn and Scheidt, so that's good.

I also find it amusing that the mainstream press is just now catching up with the article that Wired.Com did over four months ago. The reporter for the wired.com piece, Kim Zetter, did an excellent and thorough job, and it's really her article that eventually sparked the WSJ article, which sparked multiple types of coverage: An invitation for me to be on a local St. Louis talk-radio show, an upcoming piece on Philadelphia media for another Kryptos researcher, a CNN segment that'll probably air next week, and the NPR segment which aired today. And the NPR segment is probably what sparked an article that'll be upcoming in the U.K. newspaper "The Guardian", probably hitting the wires this weekend.

It's fascinating watching the press ripples, to see who picks up which story.

And tracing backwards: Kim's wired.com article was sparked by the talk I gave at Def Con, which can be traced back to my own introduction to Kryptos, via the PhreakNIC v3.0 Code which JonnyX wrote back in 1999.

"The flapping of a butterfly's wings," indeed....

Elonka :)

NPR : CIA Experts Still Spooked by Kryptos Puzzle

Episode 99 - Kryptos

Airdate: 2005-06-08
Length:1:31:48
Size:15.69 MB

Hosts:StankDawg & Elonka

Fun 90-minute episode this week. Main topics: E-3, Hero's Journey, Privacy, Identity Theft, and Kryptos.

Binary Revolution - Episode #99

] This is a transcript of the "Cyrillic Projector"
] sculpture. The sculpture was created in the early 1990s
] by James Sanborn (best known for the enigmatic "Kryptos"
] at Langley), and was installed at the University of North
] Carolina, Charlotte, in 1997.

Here's my current crypto project -- compiling an accurate transcript of the Cyrillic Projector. It's my hope that by cracking this code, we may get inspiration for cracking the uncracked section IV of Kryptos. To my knowledge, this transcript that I've created is the only publicly-available transcript on the web.

Sanborn's Cyrillic Projector Code

2-3 minute clip about Kryptos. The parts with me were recorded in my hotel room at Dragon*Con last year. For those of you that saw me walking around with a camera crew in tow, this is the result!

Elonka :)

Howstuffworks Videos "How Kryptos Works"