[spoonjim]

Right, but if the FBI goes and hires a code breaker, they don’t get one of the three who solved it. They get one of the thousands with the credentials to have a reasonable chance of success. So if the FBI wants to put the three who solved it on the job, they have to deploy the thousand who didn’t because they don’t know the difference between them until it’s solved.

[labster]

How about the FBI builds a time machine, goes to the future to find out who solved it, then hires those people? I call it self-fulfilling cryptography.