How do they know the notes compromise clues in the case? They could be pages of a shopping list, for all we know.
FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
41–50 of 159 posts
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#42I thought this could be a fun 'challenge'... I'm inclined to believe that this is potentially ciphered in English, due to, what look to be stiking similarities between the alphabetic character frequencies of the notes: http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.png and the frequencies of characters in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(... If anyone else wants to have a play here is my (roug…
I was just about to type all of this out when common sense kicked in and I decided to look through the comments. Bless you for sharing!
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#43How do they know the notes compromise clues in the case? They could be pages of a shopping list, for all we know.
True, but even a shopping list could reveal information that narrows down where the killer lives or shops or something.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#44I know that it isn't practical for the FBI to publicize the approaches that they've attempted in deciphering this, but I'm very discouraged by the prospect of spending time on what might be simply redoing a small corner of a failed effort by someone much more qualified.
On the contrary, sometimes "out of the box" thinking by a non-expert is exactly the lightning bolt from out of nowhere that can cause a breakthrough.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was your methodology for getting freq.png?
It's just a frequency count of the letters in the transcriptions I did. Obviously my transcript may not be perfect, but I was pretty confident with most of the letters. This was just my first observation and I thought it was interesting enough to post.
I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something.
Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency around?
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a frequency count of the letters in the transcriptions I did. Obviously my transcript may not be perfect, but I was pretty confident with most of the letters. This was just my first observation and I thought it was interesting enough to post.
I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something. Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency aro…
That's a valid point. I appreciate that it may be nothing, but that won't discourage me from having a little play with it.
Here's a CSV containing the frequency of all words from 2 upto 10 letters http://d122.com/murdermystery/words.csv if anyone's interested.
"rcbrnse" five times?!
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#47Anybody have a copy of the legible characters so each of us doesn't need to transcribe the same text?
That's assuming that a copy of the legible characters wouldn't lose any of the original information -- the way words are written could matter.
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#48I thought this could be a fun 'challenge'... I'm inclined to believe that this is potentially ciphered in English, due to, what look to be stiking similarities between the alphabetic character frequencies of the notes: http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.png and the frequencies of characters in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(... If anyone else wants to have a play here is my (roug…
Excellent. I personally love this sort of thing, though I'm rarely successful.
I was typing out the letters as I saw them, and I noticed that I interpreted many of your "S" as the number 5, but after looking at the way he wrote "S", it appears relatively consistent throughout the text.
So letter groupings became interesting: SE - 66 matches RSE - 18 matches
In the first document TFNRE appears twice.
Here's my interpretation from looking at the two documents (I really wish there were seriously high resolution scans of these docs, it'd help to sort out the asterisks which I used to represent characters I couldn't reasonably identify)
(M*ADMKNE#R-N-STA-KNARE) (ACSM)
*TFRNENP*NSEWPBSERCBBNSENPRSEINC
PRSENMRSEOPREHLDWLDNCSE(TXFLFTCXLNC*E)
AL-*RPPITXLYPPIYNCBEMEKSE*C*SEPRSE
WLDRCBRNSE*T*SNE*TXSE-C*SLE-CITRSEWLDNCBE
ALW*PNCBETSMEL*SERLSEVRGLSNEASNWLDNCBE
(NOPFSENLRENCBE)NTEGDDMNSENCURER*BR**
(TEWETFRNENC**TSENCBEI*G)
(FIRSEPRSEONDE71NCBE)
(CDWSEPRSEONSE74NCBE)
(PRTSEPRSEONERDE76NCBE)
(TFNGCMSOLEMRDELUSETOTEWLD*WLD*CBE)
(194WLD'SNCBE)(TRFXC)
ALPNTEGLSE-SE ERTE
YLSE MTSE-CTSE-WSE-FRTSE
PNRTRSEONDRSEWLDNCBE
*WLDXLRCMSPNEDVLDSTSMEXL
DULMT6TUNSENCBEXC
(*UNSARSTENMUNARSE)
KLSE-LRSTE-TRSE-MKSEN-MRSE
(SAE6NSESEMRCE)
NMRCBRSNEPTE2*TEWSRCBKN*E
**MLSE74SPRKSE29KENO*OLE17SRTRSE
8S*LECLG*E**NUTRE*KRSEPSESHLE
6SIMTCSEHTLSENCUTCTRSNMRE
99.84S2UNEP2SENCRSEAOKTSENSKSEN*SE
NSREONSEPVTSEWLDNCBE(JXORL)
*NMSENRSEINRNTRNTRLERCBRNSENTSRCR*NE
LSPNSENGSPSEMKSERBSENCEAVXLR
HMCRENMRENCBE 1/2MUNDDLSE
D-W-MIYMPL XDRX
EDIT: Ahh, half my comment was missing!
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#49A better image of the text can be found on the FBI's site:
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/march/cryptanalysis_032...
Re: FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
#50I thought this could be a fun 'challenge'... I'm inclined to believe that this is potentially ciphered in English, due to, what look to be stiking similarities between the alphabetic character frequencies of the notes: http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.png and the frequencies of characters in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(... If anyone else wants to have a play here is my (roug…
Your text files appear to be missing the indention that was in the original note. Any Python developer could tell you that whitespace can be extremely important. ;-)