Enigma

Peter Wayner writes: "In all of the scary stories Hollywood circulates about copyright piracy, nothing could be scarier that the gang of file swapping, copyright circumventing hackers in the new movie 'Enigma'. They laugh and love a bit, but mainly they spend their time building a big whirring and clicking machine to smash a copyright protection mechanism. When the machine delivers, they put the results into a Gnutella-like file sharing system called Ultra so their friends can track down the original artists and kill them." (Read on for the rest of Peter's review.)

Ooops. Wrong generation and wrong spin. "Enigma" is about good codebreakers -- the mathematicians and clerks of Great Britain's Bletchley Park who helped the Allied cause during World War II by breaking the German coding machine known as "Enigma." It's a wonderful story that's been told as non-fiction several times before by serious historians. This time around, the former newspaper columnist Robert Harris created a thinly fictionalized novel filled with composite characters based on reality. While the result is not factually perfect, it is close enough to capture the dangerous era. Abandoning the literal truth also allowed him to build a richly plotted yarn that evolves cleanly and smoothly.

The film closely follows the novel, although it does eliminate a few of the more subtle complexities. It was wildly popular in Britain when it was released there last year, probably because the story is told with gorgeously detailed sets dressed with nostalgia for a time of British patriotism and success. The film's costumes are lavish, the extras are everywhere, and the look is close enough to reality that the best complaint one ex-translator stationed at Bletchley Park could offer was that the canteen in the film was much nicer. Even Mick Jagger, one of the film's producer, couldn't resist the spirit and gave himself a cameo appearance as an officer relaxing in a club.

This film could represent the cultural high point for codeslinging nerds and other Slashdot types. Jagger produced this film with another cultural icon, Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels. If you secretly spend your days dreaming of strutting around the stage like Mick Jagger, you can now take some pride in the fact that Mick Jagger spent at least a few days dreaming of playing a code geek. And why not? According to one of the characters, the women go weak in the knees when they get to talk to codebreakers like the protagonist, Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott).

This movie is about sex and mathematics and the crucial satisfaction that comes from understanding the depth of their power. The two main threads of the film track Tom Jericho's search for 1) a missing lover (Saffron Burroughs) and 2) a new way to break the Germans' four rotor, Naval Enigma system known as Shark. His lover may have been mixed up in Germany's sudden decision to abandon the old codes and all of this must be untangled or else the war could be lost. Tom Stoppard, the screenwriter also responsible for Shakespeare In Love, weaves these two threads together with car chases, kissing, train whistles, moonlit nights, illicit file swapping and a few other romantic chords.

It seems like a lot of things happen in four days, but we must remember that this plays out in an era when people weren't couch potatoes taught that ignoring advertising is forbidden. The pacing is the biggest problem with the film because there's too much action packed into 117 minutes, leaving some transitions a bit confusing. The jumps are often too quick and in some places it's hard to know when the flashbacks begin and end.

Despite that, there's much for a geek to love in this movie. Both the Enigma machine and the cryptanalytic attack developed by the British are described in fairly good detail. We learn, perhaps too quickly, that much of the game is finding a crib, a term the codebreakers used to refer to a word or phrase that must be somewhere in the scrambled message. A weather broadcast, for instance, would include the word "rainy" on a wet day and the codebreakers would examine the possible combinations that might produce that word. That was one weakness the folks at Bletchley Park were able to exploit before Jericho's girlfriend disappeared.

Some of the other mathematical details are accurate but not explained in enough detail to be easily understood. Once the crib was identified, the codebreakers relied heavily on the fact that the Enigma machine could not encode one letter into itself. This weakness allowed them to eliminate many of the potential cribs quickly. Then they spent their time looking for potential "loops" in the coding. In a simple case, a loop is formed when the letter A is encoded as an R and a few letters later, an R is encoded as an A. Most of the loops are a chain of several letters strung out in an odd combination. This pencil-and-paper work by the codebreaker is turned over to a big machine that uses the loops to eliminate many of the potential positions of the rotors. The rest are tested quickly with plenty of whirring and clicking. On a good day, and there were many of them, the right settings for the rotors popped out and let the Allies read the encrypted traffic.

You get to see all of this in action, although the film does not describe much of it in the hopes of sparing those unanointed with the knee-weakening, code smashing gene. It's not really fair for me to concentrate on the machines and ignore the actors because most of the movie revolves around the emotional battles for the characters and their conflicting desires. These passions are well-constructed and intelligently arranged. Dougray Scott plays the mathematician with enough dash and sophistication while Kate Winslet fills out the role of the mousey clerk and co-conspirator. The real star is Jeremy Northam, who plays a sophisticated Foreign Office spy with the right amount of oily charm. He, like everyone else in this movie, is fighting a private little war which may or may not fit in with the larger battle between the Allied and Axis forces.

Some of these battles are so crucial to the plot that it's impossible to comment on them without spoiling the ending. For this reason, I'm including several links for you to click after seeing the movie ( first, second, and third.) as well as a sentence encrypted with an Enigma simulator:

FBZ DDE NZA DJN PNI POH YBF NJR QFP DDZ TVP IHN YSJ IXX UAH YXF BZT ZXW BXS GES GYD IFO VXQ KHU LMA SYX YEG MGK

Using Enigma as a digital rights management device is not new-- Harris includes an encrypted dedication in the novel-- but it raises an interesting question: Is the movie and its detailed description of breaking the Enigma in violation of the DMCA? Is the extra detail in the movie just a cookbook for those who want to pirate the sentence I encrypted above? If so, should I be able to shut it down? While some reviewers may dream of writing something so powerful that it closes a movie immediately, I would hate to do it to this one. It's a pretty, nostalgic thriller that makes a good date movie--especially if you happen to be a knee-weakening, codebreaking type.

---

Peter Wayner's latest books are Disappearing Cryptography, an exploration about how to disguise information and Translucent Databases, a practical description of how to use encryption algorithms to protect sensitive information like credit cards and medical records. If they ever get made into a movie, he wants to be played by Keanu Reeves -- the one who played Ted "Theodore" Logan, not the one who played Neo.

But is it better than Cryptonomicon?

[MeepMeep]

I was hoping Neal (Stephenson) would have been able to get Crypto made into a movie...perhaps it would be redundant now.

I just wanted to see who they would cast as America Shaftoe! (and maybe Glory too, except for the leprosy...)

Role of the Poles

[dunstan]

We Brits often complain about how war films are slanted to play up the American involvement because that's where the money for the films comes from (cf Memphis Belle). After the British release I heard an interesting radio interview where a Polish veteran was complaining about how the Poles don't get a proper share of the glory in this story.

[minor spoiler alert] The point he was making was that not only did the Poles find the machine in the first place, but if they hadn't kept quiet about it for the duration of the war then Hitler would have abandoned Enigma much sooner, or at least have had an inkling that his communications were being intercepted. But the secrecy surrounding the codebreaking operation was so good from *all* parties that Rommel went to his grave cursing the spy who was giving away information from his signals back to Germany.

There was an excellent series on Channel 4 about the operation about three years ago, and I would assume that it has been aired on PBS (though maybe not because it isn't exactly complimentery towards our American allies). Enigma makes the whole subject into a story, but the subject also bears telling in a documentary style.

Dunstan

Invention of the Computer

[Baldrson]

those guys invented the computer in order to defeat Nazis

As established in court [iastate.edu] the computer was invented before WW II [ameslab.gov] at Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts [iastate.edu] in Ames, Iowa [yahoo.com]

Shifting battlegrounds

[kirkjobsluder]

I know that I keep bringing this up but perhaps the best history of military cryptoanalysis in print is The Codebreakers by David Kahn. It devotes about four novel length chapters to World War II cryptography alone and also describes the first cryptographic war for the airwaves during World War I.

it also points out that one of the big revolutions in military cryptography was the coordination of code making and code breaking. The only way to make a good code is to try to break it. Knowledge of practical code breaking was never intended to be distributed outside of military circles, even to the point where the National Security Agency attempted to block publication of The Codebreakers for even revealing obsolete historical details of World War II cryptoanalysis. As a result the comparison between military cryptoanalysts and copyright crackers is a bit overdrawn. Many of the codebreakers were also involved and creating and testing military codes to hide information from the public.

Wildly popular in Britain

[kristan]

I hate to nitpick and complain (well, I guess I don't or I wouldn't be doing this) but I can assure you all that the film was not "wildly" popular here in Britain. While it may not have been a flop exactly, it was as close to "straight to video" as you can get...

DMCA/Enigma

[henben]

Whatever you think of the DMCA/P2P apps issue, it's a totally different thing from the effort to break Enigma. Defending fair use is important, but hardly in the same league as defending the free world from the Nazis.

Your lame, forced comparison cheapens the achievement of the Bletchley Park codebreakers and the Allied troops who risked their lives to capture Enigma material.

It also makes you look like a whining tosser who thinks his right to download an MP3 is as important as the rights and freedoms won in WWII.

I think the DMCA is bad too, but for fuck's sake, don't do this kind of thing again.

Read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

[Jon Howard]

It isn't a factual account of Turing's experiences, nor of WW2 in general, but it's a well-written book set during WW2 (not entirely), with a heavy focus on cryptography. The reason I bring it up is tat it is so bent on cryptography (who'd have guessed?), and Enigma has a cameo.

Cryptonomicon is engaging, I had great difficulty putting it down, though the instructional detail used to describe various technical feats compelled me to set it aside for a minute to give them a go myself. Stephenson has a solid grasp on many technical concepts, even if he doesn't get all of them 100% correct (you'll get no spoilers from me!).

All of that, and he even observes Turing's professed sexual preference in a much more honest (read: less inverted) manner.

Re:Alan Turing

[seldolivaw]

Maybe the reason so many stories seem to leave out Turing's role (Cryptonomicon is a wonderful exception) is the distasteful and appalling way he met his death. Turing was gay (and fairly openly so, for the time). The government put him through a number of disgusting "conversion therapies" (including electroshock, etc. if I recall correctly) and he eventually took his own life. It is an appalling abuse of human rights by the British government, and perpetrated against a man who single-handedly did an enormous amount to help end the war.

Re:Society Only Appreciates Scientists In Movies

[JWhitlock]

One of the reasons that the British government was quiet about Turing's role was that they wanted to keep it a secret that the Enigma machines had been compromised. According to a book on the subject (The Codebreakers, Kahn, 1996, ISBN 0-684-83130-9):

The great story of the solution of the Enigma machine ... remained a tightly held secret for almost 30 years. ... The British government insisted upon this because it had given the thousands of Enigma machines that it had gathered up after the end of the war to its former colonies as they gained independence and needed secure systems of communication.

Is this a nobler excuse than the "we don't want to bother helping a homo" excuse? Not really, but it might put a different perspective on Turing's tragic life.

Re:DMCA violation

[gotan]

Interesting enough Hitlers Book "Mein Kampf" ("My Fight") is kind of forbidden in Germany. This is done by using the copyright that lies with Bavaria (one german state), they just insist on their copyright and refuse to print the book. The copyright outside of germany isn't in their control though (i believe it lies with some britain company), so it can be printed elsewhere.

All this is not very effective (there's still some copies about in old attics, most are probably 'imported' from outside) and does more to propagate the book by mystifying it than to avoid it's distribution. It would make far more sense to distribute annotated copies to demonstrate what a load of bullshit the book is (there's an artist reading and commenting selected passages from the book, doing just that).

As for the Horst Wessel Lied: it's forbidden in Germany, performing it in public will get you in trouble (and rightly so), ID-soft replaced it in their german version of Wolfenstein, and even films critical of the 3rd reich will probably run into legal troubles in germany if they include it. Also it's apparently covered by some complex copyrights.