In the summer of 1963, Jan Berris was sitting in an office half an hour outside Washington and converting a series of codes into English text. A student of Chinese at the University of Michigan, she was on a summer internship at the National Security Agency (NSA).
In theory, Ms Berris' task was translating and analysing telegrams from China. But instead of the original Chinese message, all she got to see was a four-digit code for each word.
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