I'd also be interested in hearing of any other accounts that match my own passion for the subject :) Also, if others have any educated opinion, evidence, or theories of whether public key crypto was *undiscovered* by the NSA prior to the publication of Diffie and Hellman and RSA, I'd read them with great fascination. NSA claims to have developed public-key cryptography about ten years before the public discovery. See @article{Diffie88, author = {Whitfield Diffie}, journal = {Proceedings of the IEEE}, month = {May}, number = {5}, pages = {560--577}, title = {The First Ten Years of Public Key Cryptography}, volume = {76}, year = {1988} } a paper I hightly recommend to this entire list.