From an article in the Seattle Times on a local UW student competing in the 2007 TopCoder Collegiate Championship:
TopCoder is a private company that makes money by selling some of the finished code and matching employers with contestants. The competition is also sponsored by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, Deutsche Bank and the National Security Agency — which states on the competition Web site that it wants to employ U.S. citizens to help break.
Yes, I copied that over correctly. “to help break.” Ah perfect fodder for paranoid interpreations: (1) NSA is in Seattle Times computers and didn’t want a mention of breaking cryptosystems. (2) The Seattle Times is part of the liberal media establishment and therefore “break” is a political slip of the tongue to remind us that the U.S. intelligence community is behind torture (that the NSA is not the CIA can not stop the conspiracy minded who will immediately note that the head of the CIA was previously the head of the NSA.) (3) “Break” is a code name for the NSA’s quantum computer. They need programmers for it’s quantum computer. Nuf said.
“Break†is a code name for the NSA’s quantum computer.
According to Digital Fortress, that would be TRANSLTR.
Alas, the nefarious and all-knowing NSA noticed this brief glimpse the Seattle Times offered into the terrible truth, and it has forced changed the article to be changed. It know reads “it [the NSA] wants to employ U.S. citizens to help break ciphers.”
But luckily the terrible truth is immortalized forever here… unless they force you, Dave, to change it!