50 Things That Made The Modern Economy with Tim Harford

Two graduate students stood silently next to a lectern listening as their professor presented

their work to a conference. This wasn't the dumb thing. Usually the students themselves

would get to bask in the glory and then wanted to, just a couple of days previously, but

their families talked them out of it. It wasn't worth the risk. A few weeks earlier, the

Stanford researchers had received an unsettling letter from a shadowy agency of the United

States government. If they publicly discussed their findings, the letter said, that would

be deemed legally equivalent to exporting nuclear arms to a hostile foreign power. 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 conspiracy involving

the president? No. They were planning to give the humdrum sounding international symposium

on information theory and update on their work on public key cryptography. The year was

1977. If the government agency had been successful in their attempts to silence academic cryptographers,

they might have prevented the internet as we know it. To be fair, that wasn't what they

had in mind. The worldwide web was years away and the agency's head Admiral Bobby Ray

Inman was genuinely puzzled about the academic's motives. In his experience, cryptography,

the study of sending secret messages was of practical use only for spies and criminals.

Three decades earlier, other brilliant academics had helped win the war by breaking the Enigma

Code, enabling the Allies to read secret German communications. Now, Stanford researchers

freely disseminating information that might help adversaries in future wars to encode

their messages in ways the US couldn't crack. To Admiral Inman, it seemed perverse.

His concern was reasonable. Throughout history, the development of cryptography has indeed

...