In his memo to Schwartz, Hellman made a lucid case for the value of public-domain cryptography research. Second, Deborah Shapley and Gina Kolata of Science magazine discovered that Meyer was an NSA employee.Īs soon as Hellman received a copy of the letter, he recognized that continuing to publish might put him and his students in legal jeopardy, so he sought advice from Stanford University counsel John Schwartz. If Meyer's interpretation of the law was correct, it seemed to place severe restrictions on researchers' freedom to publish. First, the letter suggested that merely publishing a scientific paper on cryptography would be the legal equivalent of exporting nuclear weapons to a foreign country. Meyer's letter alarmed many in the academic community and drew coverage by Science and the New York Times for two main reasons. Meyer concluded ominously that "these modern weapons technologies, uncontrollably disseminated, could have more than academic effect."
Without naming Hellman or his co-authors, Meyer specified the issues of IEEE's Transactions on Information Theory journal and Computer magazine in which Hellman's articles appeared. Meyer's letter asserted that the IEEE and the authors of the relevant papers might be subject to prosecution under federal laws prohibiting arms trafficking, communication of atomic secrets and disclosure of classified information. "I have noticed in the past months that various IEEE Groups have been publishing and exporting technical articles on encryption and cryptology-a technical field which is covered by Federal Regulations, viz: ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations, 22 CFR 121-128)." Meyer sent a shrill letter to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which had published Hellman's papers and was holding the conference. The tension between Hellman and the NSA only worsened in the months leading up to the 1977 symposium. Even so, in the words of an internal NSA history declassified in 2009 and now held in the Stanford Archives, "NSA regarded the technique as classified. The NSA acknowledged that Diffie and Hellman had come up with their ideas without access to classified materials. government's longstanding domestic monopoly on cryptography deeply annoyed many in the intelligence community. The fact that Hellman and his students were challenging the U.S. As Hellman recalled in a 2004 oral history, the nonmilitary community's reaction to the paper was "ecstatic." In contrast, the "NSA was apoplectic." The paper introduced the principles that now form the basis for all modern cryptography, and its publication rightfully caused a stir among electrical engineers and computer scientists.
The researchers in question were Martin Hellman, then an associate professor of electrical engineering, and his students Steve Pohlig, MS '75, PhD '78, and Ralph Merkle, PhD '79.Ī year earlier, Hellman had published "New Directions in Cryptography" with his student Whitfield Diffie, Gr. In addition to talks with titles like "Distribution-Free Inequalities for the Deleted and Holdout Error Estimates," the conference featured the work of a group from Stanford that had drawn the ire of the National Security Agency and the attention of the national press. The International Symposium on Information Theory is not known for its racy content or politically charged presentations, but the session at Cornell University on October 10, 1977, was a special case.