Re: The NSA Visits Compendium

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

At 02:05 PM 10/16/95 -0700, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
>a study on this would be very significant. (from what I understand, the NSA
>tried to do this with public key crypto, i.e. suppress it at the
>publication stage. a professor gave a lecture on this in one of my
>classes and said that it was even covered in the NYT at the time.
>unfortunately I lost the date. I believe it was a long time ago
>(maybe the 80's or even the 70's). hopefully someone else has an
>encyclopedic brain.

1977/1978.  "A Proposal for a Public Key Encryption System."  IEEE meeting.
Imprisonment threat by letter.  Mathematical Games column in Scientific
American.  3,000 copies of paper distributed free by MIT.

>unfortunately, whenever someone says, "don't name my company", it loses
>effectiveness. I would like to point out that people are directly contributing
>to their erosion of rights by this behavior that suggests that they
>doing something lawbreaking that they are ashamed of.

One should always suggest to investigating authorities that they show a
warrant or get lost.  "Quo warranto"?  It is rarely useful to chat with them.

DCF