You need to consider that this individual had to create the code and communicate its nature to compatriots on the outside. The code had to be simple enough for said compatriots to use in encoding information themselves, as well as being amenable to manual encryption and decryption. Since we can assume said compatriots probably were not exactly computer programmers or mathematicians. All of these requirements had to be met while keeping the code reasonably difficult for police to decipher.
I think it is, too often, tempting to only consider one side of the creation process in situations like this without giving due consideration to context. Giving full consideration to context, this would, to me, seem a relatively dangerous individual.
On another note, this is another example of how far law enforcement is willing to go, in terms of resources, to get their man or woman. Normally, the vast majority of us are not worth the effort of listening to our phone calls, or reading our emails, snail-mail, texts, or web posts. HOWEVER, once a spouse's body turns up, or ANY bodies turn up ... or maybe a bank goes under ... all of that changes. They will look through EVERYTHING. And you will be worth the effort to decrypt it.
It's not only national security that will get you that level of resource allocation.
It sounds like the codebreaker in the article only took a few hours to break it (but maybe something got lost in the writing), that's not a huge allocation of resources in a case involving assault and such.
If the police were in the habit of decoding simple ciphers like this, they could have put it in front of somebody that wouldn't describe this code breaking process as painstaking.
You need to consider that this individual had to create the code and communicate its nature to compatriots on the outside. The code had to be simple enough for said compatriots to use in encoding information themselves, as well as being amenable to manual encryption and decryption. Since we can assume said compatriots probably were not exactly computer programmers or mathematicians. All of these requirements had to be met while keeping the code reasonably difficult for police to decipher.
I think it is, too often, tempting to only consider one side of the creation process in situations like this without giving due consideration to context. Giving full consideration to context, this would, to me, seem a relatively dangerous individual.
On another note, this is another example of how far law enforcement is willing to go, in terms of resources, to get their man or woman. Normally, the vast majority of us are not worth the effort of listening to our phone calls, or reading our emails, snail-mail, texts, or web posts. HOWEVER, once a spouse's body turns up, or ANY bodies turn up ... or maybe a bank goes under ... all of that changes. They will look through EVERYTHING. And you will be worth the effort to decrypt it.
It's not only national security that will get you that level of resource allocation.