I peeled this off of Usenet, Wondering if this is Tim doing a little trolling? Cheers! The Christmas Troll --(fwd)-- Hi all, If you've never heard of the National Cryptologic Museum and have an interest in this kind of stuff, you MUST go take a look. It's at Fort Meade, outside Laurel, Maryland, and actually lies on the grounds of the NSA. I dropped by the other day and was very impressed. The NSA is to be grudgingly %^) commended, although the material on recent operations (post-1950) is understandably a little thin. The very coolest exhibit is a functioning Enigma machine on which visitors are allowed to encrypt/decrypt messages. It really does work well, and I got the same gloating thrill I felt the first time I decrypted a PGP message from a friend. There is also a piece of Gary Powers' U2, a Cray X-MP processor that you can sit on and peer into, several specimens of old Japanese crypto machines, and incontrovertible proof of the Rosenbergs' perfidy and treason, among many other interesting displays. The staff is friendly and informative, but you will not get the current key codes for ICBM launch control out of them, of course. I did not see any mention of PGP or related topics in my brief visit, either. Oh, and most surreal was the entrance: at the end of the road, an almost unmarked gate a yard wide in a razor wire fence, dangling a padlock. I wondered for a moment if it were the right place and if I would be shot if I actually went inside. Allow half a day if you are a serious student of these topics, and an hour or two if not. All in all, it was the second most interesting museum I saw in Washington (after Air & Space). I still don't trust Clipper, but it was certainly nice to see the human side of the big bad spooky NSA. They have done an important job for the country and don't deserve most of the abuse that I see heaped on them on the Internet. --ccm Christopher C. May, M.D. Univ. of Texas Health Sci. Ctr. San Antonio may@uthscsa.edu * 72707.413@compuserve.com "Too much Law; not enough Order." --