Shakespeare, Bacon, and the NSA

The talk opens with Francis Bacon's line "knowledge is power" and the story of Elizabeth Smith Friedman, a cryptologist whose career started in the early 1900s at Riverbank, a private research estate in Illinois. She was hired to help check a supposed hidden cipher in the First Folio, a project meant to prove Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. There she met William Friedman, and the two came to doubt the theory, while their work on ciphers grew into professional cryptanalysis.

The middle of the talk follows their wartime careers. The Zimmermann Telegram helped push the United States toward World War I, and the Friedmans became central to decoding enemy messages and training other government departments. During Prohibition, Elizabeth worked for the Coast Guard on bootlegging messages and gave testimony in court cases. Before and during World War II she helped expose Nazi spy networks in the Americas, work the FBI often received credit for. William founded the Army Signal Corps, which later evolved into the NSA. After Elizabeth's contributions became public, the NSA renamed an Fort Meade auditorium to honor both of them.

The closing section draws four lessons for modern defenders: work across disciplines, think like an attacker, test and improve security continuously, and speak up when compliance is mistaken for real safety. The speaker links the Friedmans' pattern recognition to today's AI tools and argues that human judgment still matters.