Man charged over stolen Enigma machine

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/0011/19/A61292-2000Nov19.shtml

Source: AP|Published: Sunday November 19, 10:40 AM

LONDON - Police today charged a man in connection with the theft of a
rare World War II code machine.

Dennis Yates, 57, was charged with blackmail and handling stolen
goods, Thames Valley Police said. He was arrested yesterday by
officers investigating the theft of an Enigma machine, used by the
Nazis to encrypt top-secret messages.

The device was stolen from the Bletchley Park Museum, 80km north-west
of London, on April Fool's Day.

In September, museum staff received a letter demanding STG25,000
($A69,156.29) for the Enigma's safe return. The writer, who signed
himself the Master, claimed to be acting for a third party who had
bought the Enigma without knowing it was stolen.

Staff at Bletchley Park - where a top-secret team of wartime
code-breakers laboured to crack the Enigma cipher - attempted
unsuccessfully to negotiate a handover.

In October the device, which resembles a manual typewriter, was
discovered in the London mailroom of the British Broadcasting Corp. It
had been mailed to news anchor Jeremy Paxman - minus several of the
rotors it used to encrypt messages.

The Enigma code was so complex - each message had 150 million million
million possible encodings - that the Germans considered it
unbreakable.

More than 70 Enigma machines are known to exist, according to a list
compiled by data-security researcher David Hamer. Bletchley Park's
Enigma is a rare and especially complex model used by Abwehr, German
military intelligence

Historians say the work of the Bletchley Park codebreakers shortened
the war by as much as two years. The messages they deciphered provided
crucial information during the Battle of the Atlantic, the desert
campaign against German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the
preparations for D-Day.

Yates was scheduled to appear in court on Monday.

The rotors were still missing, a police spokesman said, on customary
condition of anonymity.

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