A very interesting book. Interesting and fascinating, but still lacking something. The book describes people and events and methods at Bletchley Park during the second world war. Bletchley Park was where German, Italian and Japanese codes were broken, where messages were deciphered and interpreted and employed up to 10000 people at the end of the war. It was also where the first computer (Colossus) was built.

As you can guess, there is no lack of stories to tell, or is there? It seems the British security was so successful that few knows what was going on and by now most of the people that worked there has died. The British let the Americans take the credit for most of the accomplishments while they returned to their post-war jobs.

There are people here that could probably fill books but are just sidenotes. There are inter-country and inter-department disputes. There are love stories and love children. There are brilliant minds in crazy people's bodies. All this are touched but never studied in depth. Because of lack of materials or because of lack of space I don't know.

Still, this is the best book I've read about what was going on at Station X (where X is the roman numeral 10 I now know), i.e. Bletchley Park.

One thing that struck me because it's still true is that all the theoretically safe cryptos were broken because they were used the wrong way. Because the text in them could be predicted or because the operator leaked information. For instance the German operator that sent a message of just LLLLLLLL....LLL. This is still true with todays online crypto. In theory they are safe but sometimes there is that one bug in the implementation that means that an implementation has 65000 different keys instead of billions of them.

The successful secrecy is another thing to remember. When you have broken a crypto that everyone uses, the last thing you want is for anyone to know about it. So if cryptos today are broken, they will not use it to charge someone that has killed 2 people in a shootout. It will be used for the big things. War. Diplomacy. ( )