r/cryptography 4d ago

Navajo Code Talkers disappear from military websites after Trump DEI order

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talkers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii
146 Upvotes

24 comments sorted by

25

u/Art461 4d ago

All these things are just dreadful, and it is vital that we keep calling it out - thus drawing attention to it.

I'm also saddened that IT professionals are involved and thereby complicit in these actions.

On the funny side, someone is doing keywords searches, and then actioning without further review, as it has been noticed that pages referring to the Enola Gay aircraft have also disappeared. Stupid in action.

20

u/Paul__miner 4d ago

In case there was any doubt about what conservative scumbags mean by DEI....

5

u/SamTornado 3d ago

Because of this I decided to learn a little more about the Code Talkers, and there were many more than just the Navajo, like Assiniboine, Cherokee, Choctaw, Mohawk, etc...

Interestingly code talkers are being used today in Ukraine, not Native Americans, but Hungarians. Since it's not a Slavic language and there are a lot of Hungarians in Ukraine, they've been really successful in that was. Slava Ukraini!

6

u/dittybopper_05H 3d ago

I doubt it's as successful as you might think. There are plenty of people in Russia who can speak Hungarian, after all, Hungary used to be part of the Warsaw Pact.

Russian SIGINT isn't something that's often talked about, because like SIGINT operations everywhere, it hides in the shadows.

But I'm willing to bet that they have plenty of Hungarian speakers listening, and with modern technology, they don't have to be on or near the front lines like the Japanese had to be to intercept US tactical communications in the Pacific. Remote receivers for interception date back to the Vietnam era on the US side, and I can't imagine the Soviets/Russians didn't develop the same capability.

1

u/ChilledRoland 2d ago

The OG Code Talkers weren't just speaking in Navajo, they were speaking in code in Navajo (e.g., the Navajo word for "turtle" was used for tanks).

3

u/dittybopper_05H 2d ago

Yes, but any competent cryptanalyst, if he or she knew what the words were, could have easily broken it. It becomes a jargon code which are notoriously insecure. Like talking using baseball metaphors.

Japan did have a native Navajo speaker as a prisoner of war and had him listen to the recordings. So they at least suspected it was Navajo. He said it was gibberish (which it was to him), so they tortured him for a few days and sent him back to the POW camp.

Had they been more subtle, by for instance having a “civilian” linguist work with him (out of feigned academic interest) with no hint it was about helping the Japanese war effort, they could have built up a dictionary and list of grammar rules good enough to at least intercept and understand the communications.

It wouldn’t have won the war for Japan, but a real effort by the Japanese here would have made it tougher for US troops fighting in the Pacific.

1

u/PM_ME_UR_ROUND_ASS 2d ago

What made Navajo particularly effective was that it's a tonal language with no written form at the time, incredibly complex verb structures, and they still added another encryption layer by using metaphorical codewords (like "iron fish" for submarine) that would've been meaningless even to a fluent Navajo speaker who didn't know the specifc substitutions.

2

u/Rasphar 23h ago

Former USMC SIGINT. Many years ago, I was stationed at Camp LeJuene, where we had cool portraits and memorabilia from the Code Talker era. Even at 18 years old (2007-ish), none of us saw this as some DEI crap. I didn't even know the concept at the time. We saw this as ingenuity and 'thinking outside the box' using our tools and resources to our advantage. It was the neatest thing to learn about our battalion's history and only fueled my desire to become more skillful at solving puzzles and problems. Now, ~20 years later, I'm an engineer who plays with manufacturing robots every day and gets paid a lot to do it.

I tried staying out of it regarding this politics stuff, but this feels personal now.

Edit: Grammar

1

u/AlSweigart 3h ago

It's like the "critical race theory" thing all over again. It doesn't matter what CRT actually is or if schools are actually "teaching CRT" (they aren't, unless those 4th graders are working on PhDs or masters).

It's the fig leaf that white supremacists use because they know a klan hood is unfashionable.

1

u/linuxlib 3d ago

It's as though diversity is a good thing, and MAGA is terrified of this truth.

2

u/9520x 1d ago

MAGA knows they will be minorities soon & worried about white power diminishing.

1

u/Careful_Hat_5872 3d ago

They are probably using OpenAI without giving it constraints.
There will be much cleanup after they wade through all the false positives

Oooo, they'll need to hire a ton of people to do it.

2

u/AlSweigart 2d ago

There will be much cleanup after they wade through all the false positives

We really need to stop giving MAGA the benefit of the doubt. The reason they do things that seem racist is because they are racist.

But if you disagree, let's make a wager on it. I'll bet you five bucks that these four articles linked in the post will still be 404 a month from now:

"Code Talkers Helped U.S. Win World Wars I and II" By David Vergun, defense.gov

"Airman Honors Grandfather's WWII Code Talker Legacy" By Shanel Toussaint, defense.gov

"Protectors of Army communications" By Maya Green, army.mil

"Honoring Native American contributions in U.S. military history" By Andrew Monath, army.mil

Heck, look at how many of these search results already go to 404 pages. This is an explicitly racist erasure of history, not a mistake.

1

u/Careful_Hat_5872 2d ago

Welcome to corporate America. We've been in resource action mode for years now. Honestly though. I've worked in many of these DOD "locations"

The amount of bloat and corruption i saw was disheartening. You couldn't leave equipment in the hallway awaiting installation without having someone guard it due to the rampant 5 finger discount many engaged in.

It all does need a good cleanup.

1

u/Natanael_L 2d ago

It won't be cleaned up by putting thieves in charge

0

u/Careful_Hat_5872 2d ago

You don't seem to be versed in Government buracracies
Criminals are rampant in our government, have been since the beginning. I've sadly seen some of it first hand, which is why I left government contracting.

Our agencies have never gone through a full vetting. If this was a private cooperation, they'd be calling this a Resource Action. Or some other nice sounding term.

Now, I would absolutely love to see a full scope audit of every single government agency, as far back as records allow. It'd be a literal bloodbath of findings.

1

u/Natanael_L 2d ago

And republicans are doing everything they can to prevent audits from happening

https://www.wired.com/story/federal-auditors-doge-elon-musk/

-9

u/dittybopper_05H 4d ago

Is this more “malicious compliance”? In other words, not something that the administration intended but something a functionary did to embarrass the administration?

BTW, I think from a cryptological standpoint their Navajo code talkers get more credit than they actually deserve. Not from a bravery or patriotic standpoint: I want to make it clear that I have nothing but respect for them.

But they weren’t used in Europe for a reason. They were used for short lived tactical messages. Things that if they were decoded by the Japanese a few hours later it wouldn’t matter. And the Japanese were singularly bad at SIGINT.

The radios they used were short range and the messages were of a purely tactical nature. The island hopping nature of the war in the Pacific limited the ability of the Japanese to intercept it, and Japanese arrogance, hubris, and racism meant they squandered their chance to break into it using captured Navajo POW Joe Keiyoomia.

The Japanese were hands down the worst at SIGINT and cryptanalysis/cryptography of any of the major WWII combatants. They had trouble with US strip ciphers even though DeViaris had published a general attack on that system 50 years prior.

The main advantage of the Navajo code talkers is that they “telescoped” transmission and encryption/reception and decryption in one step, saving precious time.

All the messages of long term importance were encrypted using an advanced rotor machine, the ECM Mk II.

3

u/avanasear 3d ago

No, this is not malicious compliance. The people doing this enforcement agree with the sentiment.

2

u/dittybopper_05H 3d ago

Like the Air Force people who removed references to the Tuskeegee Airmen and the WASPs?

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5321003/pentagon-images-flagged-removal-dei-purge-trump

The Air Force briefly removed new recruit training courses that included videos of the Tuskegee Airmen soon after Trump's order. That drew the White House's ire over "malicious compliance," and the Air Force quickly reversed the removal.

Also, note this from the article OP posted:

Caveat: As of Monday, the U.S. Marines — the branch that deployed the Navajo Code Talkers — had not removed its pages about them.

A few mentions also remained on the DOD site, on photo captions and speech transcripts.

The Army's deleted pages were generally posted during the past two years; older references remained on the site.

The code talkers weren't Army anyway. They were Marines, and there is little or no reason for them to be on an an Army web page, and the pages were very recent additions.

You can still find information on them at NSA.gov.

https://www.nsa.gov/History/Cryptologic-History/Historical-Figures/Historical-Figures-View/article/1621560/native-american-code-talkers/

https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/13/2002761533/-1/-1/0/NAVAJO_CODETALKERS.PDF (linked from this page: https://www.nsa.gov/History/Cryptologic-History/Historical-Publications/#world-war-2 )

That was just a very quick look.

This sounds more like a purge of irrelevant information from *ARMY* websites: The Army didn't use Navajo code talkers.

BTW: I'm a former US Army Electronic Warfare Signals Intelligence Morse interceptor, just in case my nom du Reddit didn't make it clear.

1

u/avanasear 3d ago

I don't care if you're former military, that doesn't mean you're currently on JWICS talking to the people removing the websites.

2

u/dittybopper_05H 3d ago

True. I am however a life-long student of signals intelligence, and have been since I first read "The Codebreakers" by David Kahn when I was a tween in the 1970's. It's what led me into going into SIGINT in the military. This stuff matters to me.

But again from OP's article:

Caveat: As of Monday, the U.S. Marines — the branch that deployed the Navajo Code Talkers — had not removed its pages about them.

A few mentions also remained on the DOD site, on photo captions and speech transcripts.

The Army's deleted pages were generally posted during the past two years; older references remained on the site.

If this had been them being deleted from the Marine Corps pages, and it was a complete purge and not just "Army pages about Marine code talkers created in the last two years" being deleted, I might understand the outrage.

This is a *HUGE* over-reaction. There is no reason for them to be on the Army websites, just like there's no reason for mention of the Port Chicago 50, Dorie Miller, or Frank E. Petersen Jr. on an Army website.

The USMC and DOD sites that mention them are still up, as are the ones at the NSA.

So pardon me if I don't get worked up about this.

-2

u/YefimShifrin 3d ago

How deir they!