How does this artwork elucidate its Solvers?
The first person to announce publicly that he had solved the first three passages was Jim Gillogly, a computer scientist from southern California, who deciphered these passages using a computer, and revealed his solutions in 1999.After Gillogly's announcement, the CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had solved the same passages in 1998 using pencil and paper techniques, although at the time of his solution the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community. No public announcement was made until July 1999, although in November 1998 it was revealed that "a CIA analyst working on his own time [had] solved the lion's share of it".The NSA claimed that some of their employees had solved the same three passages but would not reveal names or dates until March 2000, when it was learned that an NSA team led by Ken Miller, along with Dennis McDaniels and two other unnamed individuals, had solved passages 1–3 in late 1992. In 2013, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Elonka Dunin, the NSA released documents that show these attempts to solve the Kryptos puzzle in 1992, following a challenge by Bill Studeman, then Deputy Director of the CIA. The documents show that by June 1993, a small group of NSA cryptanalysts had succeeded in solving the first three passages of the sculpture.The above attempts to solve Kryptos all had found that passage 2 ended with WESTIDBYROWS. However, in 2005, Dr Nicole Friedrich, a logician from Vancouver, Canada, determined that another possible plaintext was: WESTXLAYERTWO. Dr. Friedrich solved the ending to section K2 from a clue that became apparent after she had determined a running cipher of K4 that resulted in an incomplete but partially legible K4 plaintext, involving text such as XPIST, REALIZE, AYD EQ HR, and others, but the find that instigated her discovery of K2 plaintext was the clue WESTX.
On April 19, 2006, Sanborn contacted an online community dedicated to the Kryptos puzzle to inform them that what was once the accepted solution to passage 2 was incorrect. Sanborn said that he made an error in the sculpture by omitting an S in the ciphertext (an X in the plaintext), and he confirmed that the last passage of the plaintext was WESTXLAYERTWO, and not WESTIDBYROWS.
NSA Jim Gillogly logician cryptanalyst Bill Studeman Freedom of Information Act California Elonka Dunin computer scientist Vancouver sculpture