Jim Sanborn couldn’t Cry. He was weeks away from auctioning off Kryptos, the carved image he had created for the CIA that had defied a solution for 35 years. As is always the case, the wannabe solutions have been kept and paid him a fee of $ 50 to offer their guesses in the unedited portion of the 1,800 text message that has been written, known as K4-Adrof without exception. Then on September 3, he opened an email from the latest applicant, Jarett Kobek, who began, “I believe the text of K4 is as follows…” He had seen words like thousands of times before. But this time, the script was right.
Sanborn tells me, that: “I was surprised. “A big shock.” The timing was bad. Sanborn, who turns 80 this year, saw the auction as a way for someone to continue his work to find possible solutions while maintaining the mystery of Kryptos. He has always looked forward to being compensated for his work. Next came the next. He quickly got on the phone with Kobek and his friend Richard Byrne, who was rubbing him for reporting that they did not find a solution with Codebreak. Instead, Kobek had learned of an auction that said some Kryptos items were being held at the Smithsonian art archives in Washington, DC. Kobek, a California writer (one of his books is called I hate the Internet), got his friend, the playwright and journalist Byrne, to take some pictures. To Kobek’s surprise, the two images contained a 97-character space for words assigned to the sanborns as clues. He was staring at so much unwritten code that the CIA and NSA codes, as well as countless academics and hobbyists, had been searching for decades.
The secret of Kryptos was out of the artist’s hands, in the most embarrassing way imaginable – Sanboard himself had accidentally sent them in legible form to a museum. For 35 years Kryptos Plainext was a conference that no one came to. Suddenly others had found it – not by climbing to the top but by beating the climb to the top. Sanborn’s Big Idea for a piece of art that illuminates the concept of finding secrets itself didn’t work – as did the auction. Now he had to figure out what to do about it.
Enter: the media
The first phone call was friendly. Kobek and Byre insisted that they did not want to confuse the auction. After the meeting, Sanborn called the Auction House. This is when things start to go sideways. Where Sanboard told me, “they said, ‘Listen, you guys are going to sign NDAs, see if they’re going to take a cut of the profits.’ And I said, ‘Oh Geez, man, I don’t know about that. But I gave it up. “
Kobek and Byrne were uncomfortable with that arrangement and refused to sign. (RR Auction Executive Pice Montos Bobby Livieston did not comment on the legal issue but said of the NDA, “it’s something that would comfort our customers.”) It’s something that would comfort our customers. “) It’s something that would comfort our customers.”) It’s something that would comfort our customers. He thinks Kobe and Byrne will keep quiet. “If you don’t let it go, you’re ordering it from me,” Sanborn told them.
“I thought everything was fine,” she said, “and then suddenly [the journalist] John Schwartz calls me and says these people want to publish it in the New York Times. Kobek explains to me that they contacted Schwartz in part to reduce the legal pressure. of copyright if there might be copyright problems if there might be copyright problems if there might be copyright problems if there might be copyright problems if there might be copyright problems if there might be copyright problems if there might be copyright problems if not Kobek and Byrne Published the sign.) On October 16, Schwartz published his scoops, he informed the world that there was a visible sign.
Sanborn tells me that Kobek shared a chat with Schwartz over the phone.. When asked about this, Kobek said, “I can’t talk about that … Said Schwartz. “As soon as my editors decided that it would not be revealed in the story, I deleted the text from my conversation file. “I can’t. ” (So don’t be a magician.)
