my visit to the National Cryptology museum

First weekend of October myself and Prasath visited the National Cryptology museum at Fort Meade. It is situated adjacent to NSA and is the only museum in US dedicated to cryptology. Some volunteers from NSA conduct scheduled tours at the museum and we tagged along with a group of people who had scheduled a tour. It was just great. Our tour guide explained the history of cryptology and focussed on how cryptology helped US during the World Wars and cold wars. He gave a demo of how the enigma works and I had an opportunity to operate an enigma machine. A piece of advice he gave after sharing about the enigma was "Dont think something is impossible. If someone thinks it is possible, then surely it is". He was referring to how the Germans actually believed that the engima cipher was unbreakable and paid a heavy price for being stubborn on that thought. An interesting concept I learnt from the tour was "code talking". During WWI and WWII, US troops deployed native americans who speak rare dialects on the communication points. Even if the enemy intercepts the message, there is no way they would understand the meaning. That was the first time I heard about this simple but interesting concept. He was referring to a native american tribe called navajo who lives intact and whose dialect is really hard to learn for anyone. Overall, it was a good trip, esp with the guided tour. It was really neat to learn about how cryptology helped making decisions and saving lives during wars.