P.S. if you do well, the NSA sends you swag; I have a couple of very nice signed letters and NSA medals that look great in my office :)
I don't mean that in an accusatory way, just genuinely curious as my perspectives (one from a whistleblower and one from 80s hacker culture) are obviously not the same as those of a modern day hacker.
The Snowden stuff is extraordinarily excerpted to that which a contractor (Snowden) was seeing in a post 9/11 strange fiasco which did bring politics into play. Bamford predates that mess.
Here's a link, for example.
My point being: be wary of any attempt to characterize NSA in just a sentence or two.
Some of this puts me in mind of people's mental model of NIST as a hive of USG cryptologic activity when it is in reality like 3 very overworked cryptographers and a bunch of project managers. (Someone correct me on this, and then reach out about being on the podcast).
I highly recommend you read his autobiography. The typical Beltway career in IT is getting clearance and then coming in as a contractor, there is nothing out of the ordinary here.
Adding to that, he was directly employed by the CIA from 2006 to 2009. The "contractor" line is a really sad attempt to discredit him.
And their expertise is exactly what makes a challenge like this difficult and fun.
That said, neither do a lot of hackers. There is a long history of collaboration between hackers and the military-industrial complex. Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because of the DoD. And the director of the NSA once gave the keynote at DEF-CON.
Even the best hacker movie, from which I take my nick, ends with the hackers assisting the NSA as if they are the good guys. :(
Intelligent people like Snowden don’t become as deep into the NSA as they are without a whole lot of “good guys” propaganda for many years first.
Biggest event of 2013: Snowden.
Biggest film of 2013: Frozen (Let I.T. Go)
Biggest game of 2013: Last of U.S.
The NSA was effectively blinded for a period of time. Do you think bad actors didn't take full advantage of this? Where did Snowden work prior to NSA? Why doesn't Julian Assange have a Hollywood film?
The Fifth Estate.
Aww, that's not so fun :( Was kind of curious to participate, but seems it's US + students only. Kind of makes sense that it's US only I guess, but why only students?
It looks like (https://nsa-codebreaker.org/leaderboard_2022) at least 350 schools has a "School Solve Times" that isn't null, so unless some students are enrolled in multiple schools, it seems like way more than 100 people managed to solve it.
"Sorry, that email domain is not recognized. -- An email address from a recognized U.S. school or university is required. If your school's domain is not recognized, please request it to be allowed by clicking HERE"
Asking the same cause this is one I've never had time to do when I was in university and would like to do it now that I'm graduated.
It is a shame you can't get access as a non recruitment target though.
(Fysa, there is a reasonable chance that someone involved in this competition is following this topic. HN is known in the more nerdy corners of the int/defense world.)
https://github.com/luker983/nsa-codebreaker-2018
https://github.com/luker983/nsa-codebreaker-2019
