Killers usually go to great lengths to avoid the police and media attention, but the self-proclaimed Zodiac, who terrorized the Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was an exception. He called ...

Throughout human history, the desire to communicate in secret has driven some of the most brilliant minds to create increasingly complex systems of hidden language. Generals encoded battle plans, ...

“A man is crazy who writes a secret unless he conceals it from the crowd,” wrote 13th-century philosopher Roger Bacon. Since ancient times, politicians, military leaders and even lovers have used ...

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When it comes to World War II cipher machines, everyone surely thinks of Nazi Germany's Enigma. Thanks in part to the massive ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. Edward Hebern of California designed ...

Many cryptographers throughout history have claimed that a particular code is the most-unbreakable ever written. But does a rarely-used code, invented in 1917 and briefly employed during World War II, ...

The damned fool who shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel also, some historians believe, wanted to set himself up as the Emperor of Mexico. Coded dispatches led to his downfall, but not conviction. How ...

FORT HUACHUCA, Ariz. -- When Ralph Van Deman established the War Department's intelligence organization shortly after the United States entered World War I, he was faced with the daunting task of ...

You could do worse than to confuse the meanings of "code" and "cipher"—even cryptographers sometime use the terms as though they had the same meaning. There is, however, a definite distinction between ...