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Phoenix666 writes:

Two graduate students stood silently beside a lectern, listening as their professor presented their work to a conference.

Usually, the students would want the glory. And they had, just a couple of days previously. But their families talked them out of it.

A few weeks earlier, the Stanford researchers had received an unsettling letter from a shadowy US government agency. If they publicly discussed their findings, the letter said, it would be deemed legally equivalent to exporting nuclear arms to a hostile foreign power.

Stanford's lawyer said he thought they could defend any case by citing the First Amendment's protection of free speech. But the university could cover legal costs only for professors. So the students were persuaded to keep schtum.

What was this information that US spooks considered so dangerous? Were the students proposing to read out the genetic code of smallpox or lift the lid on some shocking presidential conspiracy?

No: they were planning to give the International Symposium on Information Theory an update on their work on public key cryptography.

[...] The Stanford researchers wondered whether encryption could be asymmetrical. Could you send an encrypted message to a stranger you'd never met before which only they could decode?

Before 1976 most experts would have said it was impossible. Then Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published a breakthrough paper. It was Hellman who, a year later, would defy the threat of prosecution by presenting his students' work.

That same year, three researchers at MIT - Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman - turned the Diffie-Hellman theory into a practical technique, called RSA encryption, after their surnames.

Our tax dollars at work.

[Ed Note: This is from the BBC's 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy series and and is discussing a historical event. - fnord]

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