I thought this was all documented in the NYT. Does anyone have the article? Anyway, Mr.Diffie says (see below) that nothing sinister happened at the patent office regarding the RSA patent. I would like to hear of any other patents that were suppressed by the NSA hiding behind the patent office. I mean, this professor was definitely not making up a story! She gave me the NYT reference but I think I accidentally threw out the paper I wrote it on. Does anyone have the reference? I think it happened in '78. It sounds like you're talking about the Davida patent, or maybe the zero-knowledge proof patent. Here's the basic story. U.S. patent law contains a provision for ``secrecy orders''. That is, when you apply for a patent in certain sensitive areas -- and cryptography is one of them -- the application is routed to the appropriate government agencies, including NSA. If they think the invention is too good, you'll receive a notice saying that you not only can't get a patent, you're not even allowed to discuss it anymore. George Davida -- a professor -- was hit with just such an order. Eventually, it was lifted, after a lot of public protest. NSA tried claiming that the patent application proved that the issue was commercial, rather than pure free speech, but they didn't try to fight it. More recently, Shamir received a secrecy order on his zero-knowledge proof patent. This was even more insane than usual, since (a) Shamir is not a U.S. citizen, and (b) he'd already been discussing the idea at conferences world-wide. According to rumor, this order was imposed by the Army, and was lifted through NSA's intervention. I know that the Shamir story was in the NY Times, though I don't have the citation. A pointer in my files is: journal name: Notices of the American Mathematical Society journal date: Jan 88 volume/number: 35, 1 article title: Zero Knowledge and the Department of Defense author(s) name: Susan Landau page number: 5-12 but I don't have the article handy. The Davida story was probably in the Times as well; my summary of it is taken from ``Cryptology Goes Public'', by David Kahn, in ``Kahn on Codes'', 1983. The article originally appeared in the Fall 1979 issue of ``Foreign Affairs''.