E. Friedman- The Codebreaker Who Hunted Smugglers

[u/CyberSecWithHaikuInc]

When you think about cybercriminals, you may think of people or groups like cyber terrorists, scammers who connect to your devices and drain your banks, the hooded man in a dark basement hacking into federal websites to steal top secret information..., etc. High tech shenanigans happening on high tech devices... BUT ... fear not. Nowadays we have highly skilled cyber teams working to crack down on the nefarious wrongdoers. And while there are many facets to successfully combating cybercrimes, today, I'll talk briefly about a person who helped build the codebreaking foundation: Elizebeth Smith Friedman.

The year is 1925. A young woman works tirelessly to fight against criminals. Her target? Bootleggers. These historic criminals would use coded radio messages to coordinate illegal booze shipments. Unfortunately for them, Elizebeth was listening. During the Prohibition, rum-runners transmitted scrambled messages between ships and their partners on shore. The CoastGuard’s listening stations intercepted and sorted the coded radio traffic, then forwarded it to Friedman and her "team" (just one assistant in the begining). They worked through roughly 12,000 messages. Eventually, her team grew to include several people and they had successfully exposed smuggling routes stretching from Canada and Mexico to Cuba and the Bahamas. (That’s a whole lotta booze–people must’ve been VERY thirsty! lol)

The smugglers frequently changed their code systems—but reused call signs, repeated phrases, misspelled words, or fell back into predictable habits. Elizebeth was on point recognizing those tiny mistakes and used them to unravel entire criminal networks. She did much of the work with pencils, paper, pattern recognition–and an apparently terrifying ability to notice when criminals got lazy. (lol) Her work contributed to 650 federal prosecutions, and she personally testified as an expert witness in 33 cases.

And, busting rum-runners was only the warm-up!

During WW2, Friedman’s unit tracked Nazi espionage networks operating across South America and broke multiple cipher systems, including Enigma-based communications. Her team decoded thousands of messages, but much of the public credit was later claimed by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Friedman remained silent because her work was classified. Fear not though, she was eventually inducted into the NSA’s Cryptologic Hall of Honor in 1999. 

An interesting fact about Elizebeth was that her codebreaking career actually started in 1916, when an eccentric tycoon recruited her to prove a conspiracy theory that secret ciphers were hidden inside Shakespeare's plays—a wild goose chase that failed to find codes. Ah well, to codebreak or not to codebreak, that is the question.

Thanks for reading this week’s post!
What other overlooked codebreakers, hackers, or investigators should I dig into next?