The Code-Breaking Women Who Unmasked Soviet Spies

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-code-breakers-unmasked-soviet-spies-180970034/?no-ist

by axiomdata316 • 8 years ago

63 41 8 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

dingaling• 8 years ago

Headline should read 'The female cypher-breakers who...'

I do hate such abuse of language. Would the Smithsonian have written 'a man mathematician'? Of course not.

Spoygg• 8 years ago

I'm not English native speaker, why is it abuse? There is also book "Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II" that uses the same term.

mjw1007• 8 years ago

"Female" is an adjective and "women" is a noun.

In English you can very often use a noun to qualify another noun (like in "house brick"), but it's rare for "A B" to mean "B which is an A" (more often it's something like "B for an A" or "B concerning an A").

The form "Woman X" is relatively recent (it's appearing because using "female" for humans is becoming mildly taboo), so it seems odd to someone who isn't used to it.

pvg2• 8 years ago

The terms aren't perfectly symmetric and interchangeable so the Smithsonian is doing the sensible thing to avoid making it sound like they're talking about some species of fish.

chongli4• 8 years ago

This has started to crop up because the term female has taken on negative connotations. Similarly for girl. Thus woman is becoming the all-encompassing word in a way that does not parallel the male terms.

oytis• 8 years ago

Just curious: what are negative connotations of "female"? I'm not a native speaker.

teddyh• 8 years ago

Then why not simply write “The code-breaking women who…”? There’s no need to abuse the language pointlessly.

gsich• 8 years ago

It's a problem of the english language. But it's stupid nonetheless.

dang3• 8 years ago

Alright, we've given you "code-breaking women" per teddyh below.

All: please step away from the title now. There's an interesting historical story here and no need to fill the thread with smoke.

funkythings4• 8 years ago

Why does the gender matter? I hate headlines like this

pvg2• 8 years ago

The article talks about it. Right near the beginning

"Enrolled in beauty school after graduation—cosmetology being one of the few fields open to women in the 1940s"

"At the peak of the Cold War—which was also the peak of the baby boom, an era when American women were urged to spend their lives as homemakers"

funkythings4• 8 years ago

I get that. These types of headlines tend to try to highlight the fact, that these programmers are WOMEN. Well, yeah, ok, I don't care, and people shouldn't care, if programmers want to have an "inclusive" community.

Do you understand where I'm coming from?

denzil_correa3• 8 years ago

The story of Venona’s female code breakers has never been publicly told in full. Benson interviewed some of them for a classified internal history of Venona, only portions of which have been declassified and released online. More important, while the exploits of Gardner and other men have been the focus of entire books, the women themselves did not talk about their work—not to their friends, not to their families, hardly to each other. Most took the secret to their graves.

Can you see why gender matters?

mbrumlow4• 8 years ago

That maybe the books focus on some of the topics. But maybe it would have been a better book had it just focused on the code breakers and how imoortnant they were.

Society has changed alot. And all this setting the score right stuff is going to rip us apart. So every time we have to point out how bad somebody had it and who their operrssors were it is going just casue more division.

And in this case I think pointing anyof that out when telling this story is just a distraction from a real story that everybody could enjoy; that we had awesome people who did awesome shit that helped win a war.

I am not saying that the stories of oppression or injustice can't be told. Just when they are please don't try and hitch it to the far better time proof story. Eg if you want to wrtie a book about how some men did bad things and focus on on vile some men are you can do that. But at least advertise it as a book with intent to spread hate to parties not actually involved. That way when you write about "code breakers" without a gender being the main focus people can enjoy it without being distracted on either end of the spectrum.

It will come on off much more natural and powerful if when women were written about if they were done so in the same manner as men. Simply write the story "The code breakers ..." and readers will happily discover the identity of the actors in the book.

But then again people who like to point gender out often have other ajendas than simply waiting about something that could universally interest people.

(Typing from phone while holding baby. Sorry for spelling or grammar issues ).

belorn2• 8 years ago

It is very clear from reading the history of code breaking that those aspects has nothing to do with gender. Much of methods and actions made in code breaking has been intentional burned, and practically everything else is regularly classified as top state secrets in order to conceal the capability of code breaking. To say that those are part of a gendered issue implies that those practices did not exist, only applied to female code breakers, or that male code were more likely to disregarded orders and break the law.

What remains is a meta argument that book writers and self-biographers are biased towards writing about male code writers once information get declassified. The article is not focused on that, nor does it make that claim explicit. The gender political aspects exist mostly in the tile and in that short paragraph, with a barely noticeable hint later on that the reason why code breaking made up from 90% women was that men got drafted and put on front lines while code breaking was mostly voluntarist that joined the female corp. The female dominance at code breaking stopped once the male-only draft ended.

dang3• 8 years ago

Please don't break the site guidelines by introducing extraneous flamebait into threads. It leads to extraneous flamewars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

funkythings4• 8 years ago

what's the issue. I stated by opinion. If you don't like it, well, so be it

DoctorOetker3• 8 years ago

Into the 1970s, certain key Soviet wartime agents remained unidentified; even then, only selected portions of nearly 3,000 messages had been read. Customer agencies—the CIA, the FBI and agencies in the U.K.—wanted the messages mined as long as they might yield something, but in 1978, the NSA evaluated the likelihood of any more matches and decided to phase out the program within two years.

If it's declassified, are the raw cipher publically available (the decoded and nondecoded ones)?

DoctorOetker3• 8 years ago

I don't see any bulk ciphertext dump yet, but conclusions after analysis seem to be available at https://archive.org/details/thevenonafiles&tab=collection

If anyone knows if the raw ciphertexts with metadata (say date, source/"lane") are available please share! I think it would be more fun and educational to exercise on real quasi-OTP ciphertexts...

belorn2• 8 years ago

A common practice after the second world was that everything got burned in order to prevent war from accidentally reigniting. Would be interesting to know how much of that practice was used after the cold war.

DoctorOetker3• 8 years ago

it's often depicted in movies (hastily burning paperwork when the area is being invaded), but I always thought this was to destroy evidence of any war crimes.

The Code-Breaking Women Who Unmasked Soviet Spies

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