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This event served as the founding premise of Cipher Crash, an immersive exhibition project built around the communication theory of Shannon and Weaver. The students chose this framework because its core concepts, source, channel, receiver, and above all noise, functioned as precise metaphors for the mechanics of intelligence work, where every interference and distortion can tip a transmission from success to catastrophe. To accomplish this, the group created a fictional scenario in which visitors were cast as investigators tasked with foiling a simulated attack targeting the EJCAM school itself, orchestrated by a fictitious organization the students called the TSIC Mafia. This allowed the students to become both the creators of the experience and its antagonists, fully inhabiting the project rather than simply narrating it from a distance.
The exhibition was structured around three sequential workshops, each designed to reflect a specific dimension of the Shannon and Weaver model. In the first, participants received a coded alphabet and a message written in symbols, which they had to decode to obtain a clue hidden in plain sight within the room itself. In the second, they were placed in a chaotic soundscape of overlapping noise and interference, and tasked with isolating a single intelligible fragment from the confusion. In the third, armed with UV lamps, they searched through scattered newspapers for a message written in invisible ink, the final piece of information needed to identify and locate the threat. The exercise ended outside the school premises, where participants tracked down a car identified by the licence plate they had uncovered, and arrested the conspirator hiding behind it.
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On August 10, 2006, British and American intelligence services dismantled one of the most ambitious terrorist plots since September 11. Ten transatlantic flights departing from London Heathrow were targeted, the weapon of choice being liquid explosives concealed in soft drink bottles. The operation was the result of eight months of surveillance, and it was ultimately a single intercepted message, "Do your attacks now," decoded in under 72 hours, that allowed authorities to act. Among 82 arrests, 24 individuals were captured in London and its surroundings. An aviation security expert later stated that, had the plot succeeded, the loss of life would have surpassed that of the 2001 attacks. 
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