"Jim Sanborn couldn't believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers kept on paying him a $50 fee to offer their guesses to the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4-wrong without exception."
"He'd seen words like this thousands of times before. But this time, the text was correct. "I was in shock," Sanborn tells me. "Real serious shock." The timing was awful. Sanborn, who turns 80 this year, saw the auction as a way for someone to continue his work of vetting potential solutions while maintaining the mystery of Kryptos. He'd also been looking forward to getting compensated for his work."
"What came next was even more shattering. He quickly got on the phone with Kobek and his friend Richard Byrne, who gobsmacked him by reporting they did not find the solution by codebreaking. Instead, Kobek had learned from the auction notice that some Kryptos materials were held at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. Kobek, a California novelist (one of his books is called I Hate the Internet), got his friend, the playwright and journalist Byrne, to photograph some of the holdings."
Sanborn prepared to auction the answer to Kryptos while solvers continued paying a $50 fee to submit guesses for the remaining unsolved K4 text. On September 3, Jarett Kobek emailed the correct K4 text, shocking Sanborn. Kobek and Richard Byrne did not codebreak the cipher; they located a 97-character passage in Smithsonian holdings after photographing archived materials listed in an auction notice. The discovered passage contained words Sanborn had previously dropped as clues. Sanborn had inadvertently submitted readable plaintext to the Smithsonian, allowing outsiders to obtain the long-sought solution and undermining his auction plans.
Read at WIRED
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