SPLICE

“Public” is not a word most would choose to describe the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The agency attempted to keep the U.S.’s use of signals intelligence, which was widely used in World War II, tightly under wraps. The 1960’s publication of The Codebreakers; The Story of Secret Writing was one of the first major public unveilings of the NSA’s foray into cryptography. The early 70’s included the Pentagon Papers; the consequence, after the Nixon “Plumbers,” included a highly public examination of forty years of government surveillance. The NSA and its shrouded history of surveillance was quickly being pulled into the public eye. 

The early 70’s also included Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman’s invention of public-key cryptography as a way to solve the problem of secure key distribution for digital communications. By the late 70’s, Diffie and Hellman, along with three MIT professors, Ron Rivest, Adi Shanir, and Len Adleman, had created the public-key cryptography systems that are used for key distribution today. The NSA attempted to curtail the dissemination. In the years that followed, the NSA and the cryptography research community continued a dance of the NSA wanting to know what research was being developed and maintain its ability to do what it does best — spy — and of the research community wanting to develop the best algorithms to ensure private and secure data transmission. So, although “public” is not a word most would choose to describe the NSA, its attempts to limit the privacy of the public did create a public-policy-active group of public-key cryptographers. 

To learn more, check out SPLICE PI Susan Landau’s chapter: “The Development of a Crypto Policy Community: Diffie–Hellman’s Impact on Public Policy” in Democratizing Cryptography: The Work of Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. 

Susan Landau. 2022. The Development of a Crypto Policy Community: Diffie–Hellman’s Impact on Public Policy. Democratizing Cryptography: The Work of Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman (1st ed.). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 213–256. https://doi.org/10.1145/3549993.3550002