State of the Art

As anyone aware of PGP or TrueCrypt or GnuPG or AES or Mersenne Twister or a thousand other topics has now realized for decades, the state of the art in data encryption is lightyears ahead of "code cracking."

Yet we still see documentaries about how Great Britain's Bletchley Park cracked Enigma (a German toy, essentially a souped up secret decoder ring that really was state of the art for a few months in the years before television), usually on the Discovery or History channels. Bunk. At best, just a good historical moment in everybody's favorite war — WWII, the war we won. At worst, psyop propaganda feeding a myth of invicibility for home consumption, in a war we've lost.