Keeping Secrets

Tags: 1970s Government Access

Authors: Corrigan-Gibbs, Henry

Published: December 2014

URL: https://stanfordmag.org/contents/keeping-secrets

Abstract: On November 6, 2014, Stanford Magazine published an article about a group of researchers at Stanford who, at the International Symposium on Information Theory on October 10, 1997, ended “the U.S. government’s longstanding domestic monopoly on cryptography”. Prior to the symposium, the group received a letter from an NSA employee who told the group that “merely publishing a scientific paper on cryptography would be the legal equivalent of exporting nuclear weapons to a foreign country.” A lawyer at Stanford advised the group they could legally publish the information. The group decided to do so, and the fact that “a group of nongovernmental researchers could publicly discuss cutting-edge cryptographic algorithms signaled the end of the U.S. government’s domestic control of information on cryptography.” While the researchers believed that” inadequate commercial cryptography…poses an internal national security threat”, the NSA was worried that “foreign countries” would take this information and make it harder for American intelligence services to decrypt and read data. As such, the NSA tried to have Congress pass legislation to limit the publication of cryptography research, but that did not work due to the policy aims of Congress and the Carter Administration. Instead, the NSA created “a voluntary system of prepublication review for cryptography research papers,” and relied on research funding and national standards to guide the publications.