Hiding in Plain Sight

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/ff_kryptos

begin quote from above internet article:

"Almost 20 years after its dedication, the text has yet to be fully deciphered. A bleary-eyed global community of self-styled cryptanalysts—along with some of the agency's own staffers—has seen three of its four sections solved, revealing evocative prose that only makes the puzzle more confusing. Still uncracked are the 97 characters of the fourth part (known as K4 in Kryptos-speak). And the longer the deadlock continues, the crazier people get." end quote.

My parents told me about Francis Bacon's Code book from the 16th Century (Elizabethan). It stayed relevant until World War II (which goes to show the possible actual writer of the Shakespearean plays was at the least a very intelligent and complex man and who was according to one of his codes (the Bi-Literal Code) also one of two illegitimate sons of Queen Elizabeth I.

The fact that the Kryptos or (K4) has not been cracked yet just lends to the legends of "hiding in plain sight" which is one of the favorite techniques in espionage.

One puts something public so that one either thinks it mundane and disregards it or one story covers another. Sometimes such as with the original Shakespeare manuscripts there are a minimum of 7 codes within. Possibly only one or two of these have been deciphered even now 400 years later. So the clandestine use of codes by governments, Kings, Queens, Officials and later Presidents, Senators, Representatives, Generals etc. has been going on uninterrupted for thousands of years at the very least in various different cultural contexts.

The addage, "Truth is stranger than fiction" helps with this. There is always the public cover story that one reads in the newspaper that almost always is either untrue or highly modified truth. Then there is the truth that only one or a few ever know that is behind the printed public word. And then there is the truth that is so blatant that most think it fiction.

Because of this the actual truths are often there hiding in plain sight for everyone to see.