TheCodeBreakers
Friedman's apt phrase, "perforce commune daily with dark spirits to
accomplish his feats of mental jiu-jitsu."
In part it is a kind of guilt by association. From the early days of its
existence, cryptology had served to obscure critical portions of writings
dealing with the potent subject of magic—divinations, spells, curses,
whatever conferred supernatural powers on its sorcerers. Another
important factor was the confusion of cryptology with the Jewish
kabbalah.
But, important as all these were, the view that cryptology is black
magic in itself springs ultimately from a superficial resemblance between
cryptology and divination. Extracting an intelligible message from
ciphertext seemed to be exactly the same thing as obtaining knowledge
by examining the flight of birds, the location of stars and planets, the
length and intersections of lines in the hand, the entrails of sheep, the
position of dregs in a teacup
annaabi.ee 
