To: Time Magazine Letters FAX: (212) 522-0601 From: Carl M. Ellison Stratus Computer, Inc. 55 Fairbanks Blvd Marlborough MA 01752 FAX: (508) 624-7488 Re: March 14, 1994; Vol. 143, No. 11; p. 90 "Beware, Uncle Sam Wants to Listen In" Dear Editor: I enjoyed your article and was pleased to see that a poll of American citizens showed 80% opposed to Clipper. That matches my own informal count. However, the introductory paragraph of your article comes close to repeating a very common misconception by claiming that cryptography was secret and was dominated by the National Security Agency. These statements give the impression that cryptography was somehow the property of the government until recently, and that civilian cryptography is a recent development. The only thing which is new in this field is the personal computer -- making cryptography easy to apply without errors. Cryptography itself is as old as writing. David Kahn's history of cryptography, "The Codebreakers" (Macmillan, 1967), shows that cryptography strong enough to frustrate governments of the day has been invented and used by private citizens for the entire 4000 year history of cryptography. Cryptography has not been secret, either. As of 1931 when Herbert Yardley published "The American Black Chamber" (Bobbs-Merrill), there was no legal secrecy applied to even government uses of cryptography. There never has been secrecy applied to civilian cryptography. [A desire to do so was announced back in the late 1970's by the NSA's Bobby Inman about the time public-key cryptography was first published but that desire was soundly denied by Congress in the Computer Security Act of 1987.] The National Security Agency was created in the early 1950s, but strong cryptography in private hands in this country dates back to the country's beginnings. For example, the only provably unbreakable cipher (Vernam's one-time-tape) was put into public hands in about 1920, while a system cooked up between Thomas Jefferson and a civilian friend of his was strong enough that it was reinvented and used by the Navy in WW-II. "The Codebreakers" gives many more examples, through history, of civilian cryptography as strong as or stronger than that used by the military of the time and I recommend that your readers check it out in the local library. Sincerely, Carl Ellison