CCH booklet – “Give to Ferner” – The Untold Story of an American Master Cryptanalyst
“Give to Ferner” - The Untold Story of an American Master Cryptanalyst
In 2023, the NSA’s Center for Cryptologic History (CCH) published the booklet, “Give to Ferner" - The Untold Story of an American Master Cryptanalyst, which features Robert O. Ferner and his noteworthy contributions to codebreaking (cryptanalysis) that have been lost to the vagaries of time and bureaucracy. A CCH historian discovered Ferner’s outstanding legacy while researching an ...
Vera Ruth Filby
Vera R. Filby, died at her home in Savage, MD, on 15 May 2007 at age 86. She had suffered from a stroke a few weeks earlier.
One of the near-legendary figures of NSA, linking its present to England’s WW II Bletchley Park, Mrs. Filby, widow of Bletchley Park veteran, historian and genealogist William “Bill” Filby, retired from NSA in 1994, having served for over 30 years.
Mrs. Filby's career began with service to the WAVES and the Navy's Cryptologic organization and culminated with years of contributions to NSA's National Cryptologic School, including ...
The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech
Article excerpt below....
If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there's a good reason: It's true. Recently, many big tech companies revealed how few of their female employees worked in programming and technical jobs. Google had some of the highest rates: 17 percent of its technical staff is female.
It wasn't always this way. Decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming — but too often, that's a part of history that even the smartest people don't know.
I took a trip to ground zero for today's computer revolution, Stanford ...
Elizebeth Smith Friedman
Elizebeth Smith Friedman is often referred to as the wife of cryptologist William Friedman. However, this female pioneer in code breaking was actually the one to introduce him to the field. In January 2021, PBS aired a special documentary about Elizebeth Smith Friedman, based upon the book "The Woman Who Smashed Codes" by Jason Fagone. Click on the links below to learn more.
Elizebeth Friedman was a wife, mother, writer, Shakespeare enthusiast, cryptanalyst, and pioneer in U.S. cryptology. She enjoyed many successes in cryptology in her own right and has been ...
Lee Ellen Hanna
An alumna of the National War College, Lee became the first woman senior operations officer in the National SIGINT Operations Center before being promoted to the NSA’s senior executive level, including serving as deputy director of human resources and leading some of the Agency’s most mission-critical organizations.
As part of her responsibilities, Lee briefed presidents and addressed Congress, led several intelligence production organizations, chaired an NSA oversight panel on processes and management of the Agency’s personnel office, and worked closely with U.S. intelligence ...
Hello Girls
We salute the “Hello Girls.”
Communication, in this case telephone lines, were crucial to planning and coordinating military campaigns. In World War I, men of Army’s Signal Corps constructed telephone lines along the front, but proved lacking as operators. Professional telephone operators were needed to connect the calls between major entities of the Allied effort, working even on the “fighting lines.”
The Army turned to the professional women operators in the United States. Not only were these women expected to be experienced telephone operators, they also needed to ...
Genevieve Young Hitt
Genevieve Young Hitt (1885-1963) - As a young Texas debutante, Ms. Hitt probably never suspected she would one day be described as "the U.S. Government's first female cryptologist."
She likely developed an interest in cryptology alongside her husband, Colonel Parker Hitt. Ms. Hitt demonstrated a clear knack for cipher work and aside from a brief visit to Riverbank Laboratories, was self-taught. She initially deciphered messages without salary and in 1918 became a salaried Army employee, performing code work for $1,000 per year. She has also been credited with ...
Grace Murray Hopper
At the age of seven, she was already taking apart alarm clocks, determined to figure out how they worked. Often deemed “The Queen of Code,” Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral.
A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944, and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. She is credited with ...
Minnie McNeal Kenny
Minnie McNeal Kenny served as a civilian for 43 years. She joined NSA as a communications clerk at the GS-4 level, higher than the starting grades offered to African Americans at the time. She was an expert in the fields of language, cryptanalysis, and traffic analysis. Throughout her tenure, she worked to further the cause of minorities at NSA. Her legacy was not only in the impressive changes she effected in NSA structure, policy, and practice, but in the inspiration she was to all NSA employees, regardless of race, giving them faith that they could effect ...
Hedy Lamarr
Well known for her role as a movie star and a beauty icon, Hedy Lamarr is less well known for her invention of spread spectrum technology. By manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmission and reception, the invention formed an unbreakable code to prevent classified messages from being intercepted by enemy personnel. Needless to say, this achieved great things for U.S. military ships, but it also served as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, COFDM (used in Wi-Fi network connections), and CDMA (used in some ...
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace) – (1815-1852) The daughter of famed poet Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace was a gifted mathematician and is credited with having written instructions for the first computer program. While translating an article for Charles Babbage about Babbage’s engine, she added her own notes and ideas which ended up being much longer than the original article. In her article, she described how codes could be developed to handle letters and symbols, as well as numbers. She also theorized a method for the device to repeat a series of ...
Charles Matthews
Charles Matthews, a lifelong Washington resident, became the first student at Hilltop Radio-Electronics Institute, a black-owned electronics school open to African-Americans in Washington, D.C. After graduating, he was hired in 1948 by the Army’s cryptologic service at Arlington Hall. As an engineering technician, he worked in the Research and Development organization. Even though his white counterparts, with equal or less experience, received better pay, his $2,100 salary was better than most African-Americans were earning in other positions in the National Security ...