Last Of The Navajo 'Code Talkers' Dies At 93

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/06/04/318873830/last-of-the-navajo-code-talkers-dies-at-93

by pdevr • 12 years ago

115 19 12 years ago

npr.org

ChrisNorstrom2• 12 years ago

I think this is the best, if not only time, I've seen "security through obscurity" work so well.

FireBeyond• 12 years ago

Randomly, how would you know, in general?

ChrisNorstrom2• 12 years ago

You Sir, are correct. The only time I ever hear about "security through obscurity" is when it fails, not when it succeeds. I got so used to the open source model where everything is known and flaws are more likely to be fixed. I guess that doesn't work for every application.

unhammer• 12 years ago

Had some neat properties at the time though, like speeding up coded communications, and: "a speaker who has acquired a language during their childhood sounds distinctly different from a person who acquired the same language in later life, thus reducing the chance of successful impostors sending false messages" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_code_talkers#Cryptograp...

sophacles• 12 years ago

It's important to consider timeliness in these things.

On the very short timeline: messages like "attack at dawn" need only be secret til dawn, at which point the information becomes known. Any method, even if utterly broken but that takes 2 days to decipher is fine for such a thing. Many things do not need "forever" level security.

On the medium - even if they had told the Japanese that they were using the Navajo language (in this case, other American languages in other cases), it is reportedly very difficult to learn, so if we take that at face value - it would still provide a long buffer before it became insecure. The time to train up enough people to have the messages useful on the battle coordination timelines is still long. The extra bit of making the Japanese figure out what the heck the language was only added to the this timeline. Security by obscurity as a portion, not the key, to security is not a bad thing.

On the very long timeline - this is totally weak. But... most of those messages probably weren't recorded anyway, it's a very modern mindset to even consider the possibility - these voice transmissions are truly ephemeral, there just wasn't the recording technology at the time for the scale needed. Besides, there were other ciphers for textual communications. Even if there was the recording technology, it would aid in the Japanese figuring out that it was navajo, and perhaps aid in training up the people to decipher it faster, but see above.

So basically if they had kept the use of these guys' Navajo language transmissions to things that had a "keep secret" timeline that was relatively short, it was pretty secure for that use.

There are lots of interesting meta analyses in this sort of thing, but that is true no matter what the cipher.

themodelplumber2• 12 years ago

Declassified in 1968! Wow. I guess they thought they might use that trick again.

I remember reading that they had to develop ways of describing words that didn't exist in Navajo, like "submarine," which became "iron fish." I'm studying Gregg shorthand right now and have thought about this a lot, since there are quite a few words that can't be found in existing word lists. Kind of a fun challenge, but ideally you come up with something that somebody else could figure out on their own while reading your shorthand. Even though the Navajo were talking in code, things like "iron fish" turned out the same way--easy to remember and easy to decipher if you knew the language, because at that level, facilitating communication was more important than the overly defensive word-guarding stuff.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Isn't all declassification like that? They seem to have a required cooldown period. After all, once you let the cat out of the bag you can't get it back in- so what's the rush.

67726e2• 12 years ago

On the human side of things, I recall reading in a history of the code talkers how several of them were unable to get a job for their skillset of operating and working on radios directly as a result of the classified nature of their work. Whereas your run-of-the-mill white GI, or in some cases non-code-talker Najavo, could point out his work in the service your Navajo code-talker could not.

mikeash• 12 years ago

Makes sense to me. There was every reason to think that a hot war with the Soviet Union was in the cards, and the nuclear arsenal didn't reach the point of "fifteen minutes of war, then everyone is dead" until sometime in the 60s at the earliest.

Timshel• 12 years ago

In the article they link a page with more details on the code and the "iron fish" : http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61-2.htm

A bit strange that it's the most critical words which had the less variation in the end.

saalweachter• 12 years ago

With Gregg shorthand, isn't the base layer syllabic? So even if there isn't a standard contraction, isn't the representation for an unknown or nonsense word pretty straight forward?

batbomb• 12 years ago

I grew up in Farmington, NM, probably one of the few, if inly places you could actually learn Navajo in public schools, in addition to hearing it in your everyday life.

Even though I'm very familiar with the tones, stops, hard consonants and cadence, it's still strange to go back and hear it.

Luckily, more than a few times, we had code talkers speak at our schools growing up.

jakub_g• 12 years ago

I've learnt about navajo from the movie but haven't dug the topic since. Now I've glanced at the wikipedia page on navajo and got extremely surprised seeing "ł", "ą", "ę" and "ń" in navajo [1][2] - the letters I thought existed only in Polish language (not counting cyryllic languages' equivalents).

Does anyone knows about some story behind that?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_USA-Navajo.svg

themodelplumber2• 12 years ago

See e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_phonology

fiddlosopher• 12 years ago

All the vowels in Navajo can have a hook under them (indicated nasal tone) and an acute accent above them (indicating higher pitch). The "ł" is not pronounced as in Polish. It is a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. Try to pronounce l and s at the same time and you'll be in the right ball park. Navajo vowels also come in long and short duration; a doubled vowel means long. (I know all of this because I designed a font for Navajo in the early 90s, while working on the Navajo reservation. I don't know if it ever got much use, though I once saw a children's book typeset in it. Most of my friends who spoke Navajo did not read the language, probably because there wasn't enough written in Navajo to make it worth while for those who had learned to speak it growing up to learn to read it as well.)

Edit: I didn't comment on ń. According to "An Introduction to the Sound System of Navajo," by Ken Hale and Lorraine Honie (MIT unpublished ms), "the sequences /ní/ and /ni/, when occurring before consonants, are often pronounced without the vowel; instead, the nasal becomes syllabic and carries the tone originally carried by the vowel. When this happens, the tone mark is transferred to the nasal -- thus /ní/ is written [ń]; in the case of low-toned /ni/, a special tone mark [`] is used for the syllabic nasal..." I was excited to find all of this unpublished material from the late Ken Hale here: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tfernal1/nla/halearch/halea...

things• 12 years ago

I recently read Chester Nez's memoir, Code Talker [1].

I highly recommend it. Experiencing the story from a code talker's perspective and reading how he chose to enlist and fight for his country despite how it had treated his people, makes all the difference.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11437988-code-talker

Last Of The Navajo 'Code Talkers' Dies At 93

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